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Hello all!
You may have seen my project in #self-promotion, but if you didn’t, here’s a quick explanation. My project, named Sledscreen, is a 7″ touchscreen “tablet” replacement dashboard for a snowmobile. The current Sledscreen prototype hardware runs off a Raspberry Pi 5 ( Raspbian / Linux ) running a custpm Electron GUI with pure Javascript. The system features a map, this is where I need assistance. I need to integrate a high-power Bluetooth system for communication between Sledscreen devices, this will allow for location sharing between the dashboards, ultimately so you can see your friends location on the map.
I have never worked with Bluetooth at all and I definitely need help implementing this into my project, and assistance choosing high-power Bluetooth hardware that will allow for long-distance communications.
Another Bluetooth function I need to implement is communication with a cellphone, music controls, phone controls, notifications and more.
Thanks for any help.
@umeshlokhande @andrukhan any thoughts
Hi Cashton – sounds like a fun project. Before you get too deep with Bluetooth, I’d start by validating that you can get the range you need. When you describe “high power Bluetooth” – you might be referring to the newer “Coded PHY” protocol for BLE. With great antenna design, this can get you into the 1km ballpark in ideal line-of-sight conditions. But its 2.4GHz, which is particularly poor for moisture. I’d do some snowy field-testing to see if you could get a signal further than you can actually see. Wooded areas and snow covered hills are likely to be problems. *If* the range turns out to be inadequate, the next technology to look at would be LoRaWAN. It gets you to a lower frequency which does much better in non-line of sight conditions, but much lower data rate, and not as clean of an architecture for your application. Look forward to hearing more about the project!
Thank you for the help. I am going to start off with testing BLE and Coded PHY like you recommended. I will post an update here once I get the results. I am definitely interested in LoRa as well, but I need to do more research on it and figure out exactly how it would work. Again, many thanks for your assistance.
@cashton. we’re interested to hear of any progress on this project. Any updates?
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