Google ADK Project Shows Just How Easy It Is To Use

May 16, 2011 by Mike Nathan 9 Comments

first_adk_project

[yergacheffe] was able to get his hands on a shiny new Google ADK board about a week before it was announced at I/O, and got busy putting together a neat project to show off some of the ADK’s features. His idea was to meld together the ADK and Google’s new music service, two items he says complement each other very well.

He had a handful of LED matrices left over from last year’s Maker Faire, which he decided to use as a Google music metadata display. The base of the display is made from laser-cut acrylic, with a few spare ShiftBrites lighting up the Google music beta logo.

He says it took literally just a couple lines of code to get his Android handset to talk with the display – a testament to just how easy it is to use the ADK.

Pretty much anyone can walk up, attach their phone, and see their current music track on the display with zero fuss, which you can see in the video demo below.

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Destroying An Arduino’s EEPROM

May 16, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 20 Comments

We’ve seen projects test the lifespan of an EEPROM before, but these projects have only tested discrete EEPROM chips. [John] at tronixstuff had a different idea and set out to test the internal EEPROM of an ATmega328.

[John]’s build is just an Arduino and LCD shield that writes the number 170 to memory on one pass, and the number 85 on the next pass. Because these numbers are 10101010 and 01010101 in binary, each bit is flipped flipped once each run. We think this might be better than writing 0xFF for every run – hackaday readers are welcomed to comment on this implementation. The Arduino was plugged into a wall wart and sat, “behind a couch for a couple of months.” The EEPROM saw it’s first write error after 47 days and 1,230,163 cycles. This is an order of magnitude better than the spec on the atmel datasheet, but similar to the results of similar experiments.

We covered a similar project, the Flash Destroyer, last year, but that tested an external EEPROM, and not the internal memory of a microcontroller.

Check out the hugely abridged video of the EEPROM Killer after the break.

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