SirVer/ft_bt_smart_controller

Program your Fischertechnik BT Smart Controller via MQTT

Program your Fischertechnik BT Smart Controller via MQTT

Upon gifting The Smart Robots Pro set to my kids, I was a bit dissapointed that the only way of programming it was through the graphical tool provided by Fischertechnik. I wanted to be able to also do it in Python, hence I spent a few hours to make this possible. This repo is the result of this work.

The idea is to bridge the data from the bluetooth controller to MQTT, which in turn can then be read by any programming language (including Python). This allows for programming in any language, Python included.

Quickstart

1. Install mosquitto and run it on localhost.
2. Run ftbtc.
   1. You can download this from the release page, or
   2. build it yourself:
      1. Install Rust as described at https://rustup.rs/
      2. cargo run --release
3. Click the pairing button on the BT Controller.
4. Run the example Python program.

Acknowledgments

This work is not supported or tied to Fischertechnik whatsoever, but I am very grateful for their awesome products that give so much joy and teach so many valuable skills.

As usual, this work is based on prior work to which I am very grateful. Very useful was especially the work from Till harbaum (@harbaum) and I learned a lot from these links:

• https://github.com/harbaum/WebBTSmart/blob/master/control.html
• https://github.com/harbaum/RPI-BLE-toy-control