Sensor usage during manual control

Question

I created a design challenge where students will use their touch sensor and ev3 brick to play a game of freeze tag. Is it possible to have a program where they can manually control their robot via smart phone app, and when another robot presses another robots' touch sensor, they become disabled and play a noise warning they are turning off and done playing, being "Frozen".

Answer 1

The EV3-G programming language has mailbox blocks where it can receive bluetooth messages. You could write a program that until the touch sensor is pressed keeps processing the messages to control the robot. The hard part here will be writing an app for the smartphone that sends the messages, however the BT protocol EV3 uses is documented and apps are already available implementing the messaging system, e.g. in C# here: https://github.com/jovabel/EV3Messenger There's also the lego commander app, but I think the instructions sent by it bypass any program running on the EV3 brick, or rather they run in parallel so I'm inclined to think that the only solution is to write your own smartphone app...