Smartphone accelerometer as a controller with the Raspberry Pi Pico

Nowadays, each of us can be a home-grown constructor or engineer. It is enough to buy an appropriate test platform, learn the basics of a programming language and equip yourself with a simple computer that we will program. An example of this is the new project with the Raspberry Pi Pico in the lead role.

Thanks to the Raspberry Pi Pico, the smartphone’s accelerometer has become a controller, but it was not without a custom application

A man named Mohammad Reza Sharifi showed on his YouTube how he used the accelerometer in his smartphone as a controller for a toy car. Thanks to it, the car can be moved and turned, just like in mobile games of all kinds, where we control a virtual car on the racetrack. In other words, changing the position of the smartphone (tilting it from its original position) sends a signal, based on which the electric motors and steering system move the car in a specific direction.

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The most important thing about this project, however, is that it is based on a custom Android application that sends accelerometer data to the Raspberry Pi Pico in the car in real time.

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This was done using the MIT App Inventor platform, which allowed to create an application that communicates with Pico via Bluetooth. Anyone can get access to it, because its code under an open-source license has been made available on GitHub.