This week, my team and I met in person to work on Jetson-to-Jetson communication. One Jetson acted as the master node and the other Jetson acted as a trailing node (aka the RC cars which will be following the lead car). We made the cars discoverable via Bluetooth and set up a pluggable Bluetooth adapter for the trailing node. We tried to setup one of the Bluetooth adapters that we ordered online (we ordered two different ones) but it did not work on the Linux system on the car, so we will have to return that one, but now we know the other one works, so we can just order another one of the working adapter. After making the boards discoverable, we practiced by sending brief messages (like “Hello world”) and also tried sending streams of data to the lead node.
We found that a minimum of 8ms delay between sending messages was needed in order for the communication to not crash (which is perfectly fine because we will not be spamming messages one after the other in such short time frames; as of now, we plan on sending a message about every 250ms). Additionally, with our current setup we found that communication was very feasible between 3m, any further was not guaranteed to establish. As of now, the messages we send are in JSON format and we use a dictionary to encode and decode the fields we are sending. In the coming weeks I will be ensuring reliability and make the communication process more robust (by adding error-handling and add retrying if one device is not found).