Sensordrone Really Does Make Your Phone A Tricoder

July 18, 2012 by Mike Szczys 33 Comments

Sensordrone is a sensor-filled wireless dongle for use with a smart phone or other computer-like device. But perhaps this is better explained as the thing that makes your smart phone work exactly as the original Star Trek tricorders did. In one had you have the main unit that displays data, in the other you hold the sensor array which you can wave in front of things to take a reading.

This is really just a Bluetooth module, battery, a handful of sensors, and a breakout header all packaged in a nice case. But seeing it used in the video after the break does make us a little giddy. That breakout header gives you the option of connecting the Sensordrone to RS-232 or I2C devices. The first demonstration is a thermal printer being sent a print job from an Android phone. But the dongle isn’t just a pass-through. It comes with a range of sensors (those three windows in the case) for gas sensing, temperature, humidity, pressure, color sensing, and perhaps a few others.

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Android Oscilloscope Built From Parts Just Lying Around

July 14, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 36 Comments

So you need to debug a circuit and you don’t have an oscilloscope. That’s not a problem thanks to [retronics] $0 Android oscilloscope, made with parts he just happened to have lying around.

The heart of every modern oscilloscope is the ADC – the chip that takes analog input and outputs a digital signal. Every Android device has one of these converters connected to the microphone port. All [retronics] needed to do was solder up a 3mm headphone jack, wire in a few resistors, and attach a pair of alligator clips. After installing an oscilloscope app, [retronics] had a half decent ‘scope.

Yes, this is truly a poor man’s oscilloscope, and [retronics] probably won’t be debugging high frequency RF circuits with his Android microphone jack anytime soon. Low frequency stuff such as audio is where this ‘scope really excels; even more so if a small preamp is thrown into the mix.

You can check out [retronics]’ build after the break. Sure, it’s not something for precise and calibrated measurement, but sometimes you only need a tool that will do the job.

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XBMC Hits Android

July 14, 2012 by Mike Szczys 71 Comments

XBMC just issued the announcement we’ve been waiting to hear for some time now. The Android platform is now officially supported. Having seen the popularity of this open source media center software, and the willingness of some to spend hundreds of dollars on small computers to use it as their set-top-box interface of choice, we knew it was only a matter of time before a hardware manufacturer stepped up to the plate. In this case it is a company called Pivos Technology Group, who helped fund the push to bring XBMC to Android.

The good news is that the Android version of XBMC should work on a very wide range of devices. The bad news is that it will take a bit of time for that wide range of devices to support hardware video acceleration. Right now the only platform that has the hardware accelration for all video formats is the Pivos XIOS DS unit seen above. Looks a bit like a white version of the Apple TV huh? This turns out to be a great alternative to the Apple hardware, which requires a jailbreak to run XBMC and there is no jailbreak available for the current generation of that hardware. You can grab the XIOS DS for about $100-120, and as you can see after the break, it runs XBMC without a hitch, shows the ability to navigate menus while 1080p video is playing, and demonstrates working video plug-ins.

Plus, it’s an Android device with access to apps like any other. We looked around and it seems the Netflix app will work, but there is currently a problem with the video driver on units which have been upgraded to ICS. You can check out an unboxing of the device in this forum post, which is where we got the image seen above.

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Meizu MX Rooted Using The Bus Pirate

July 13, 2012 by Mike Szczys 5 Comments

It is just amazing how small the boards are for some really powerful smart phones. For instance, the diminutive size of this Meizu MX Android phone’s board is only outshone by the intricate packaging the phone arrived in. [Adam Outler] did an unboxing of the device. But for him that mean tearing down all of the components and using a Bus Pirate to root the device.

In the video after the break he gives us a candid look at what it takes to exploit this piece of hardware. You might be a little spooked by the commands, which he reads aloud character by character, but watch closely and you’ll see they’re really quite common functions.

His rooting quest began by reading the datasheet for the main processor to find the USART parameters. With that information he hooked his Bus Pirate to ground, then probed around various test points on the board while it was rebooting until serial data started scrolling on the screen. He had found the USART lines and soldered a breakout connector onto them so that he had access after reassembling the phone.

From there he used the Bus Pirate to merge with the board’s terminal, then rebooted the phone using the Android Debug Bridge. Once it fires up, the Bus Pirate terminal window is sitting at a root prompt (many companies disable this but [Adam] was lucky). He remounts the internal file system to be rewritable, then uses the ADB to push the Linux substitute user (su) command onto the device as it will be needed by the Superuser.apk program. That is the next thing to be installed and once it is he officially has root.

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Playing Pong Or Breakout On The Nexus Q

July 12, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 2 Comments

Since Google announced the Nexus Q media streaming device at the Google developers conference a few weeks ago, a lot of devs have been toying around with the idea of running Android apps on this small media sphere. [Det] over at BrickSimple threw his hat into the ring with a Pong and/or Breakout app that showcases the huge rotary volume knob on the Q.

The Nexus Q was hacked into running proper Android apps not long after it made its way into the hands of Google IO conference attendees. Of course with no way to get user input into Google’s little sphere, that hack was of questionable utility. Recently, [kornyone] over on the XDA developers forum got USB HID input on the Q, allowing for full mouse and keyboard support.

Not much has been said about the Q’s most prominent physical feature, the half hemisphere rotary encoder that serves as the volume knob. To build his Pong/Breakout clone, [Det]’s app simply responds to volume up/volume down events by moving the paddle to the left or right.

A neat build, and hopefully we’ll see a few more Nexus Q hacks in short order.

Android Controlled Monitor Stand Uses Marbles As Ball Bearings

July 6, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 20 Comments

[mobile_earth_explorer] sent in an Instructable he put together documenting an Android-controlled rotating monitor stand he built.

The stand itself is three disks turned on a lathe out of a 18mm thick board. After turning these disks, [mobile_earth_explorer] hopped over to his bench grinder and made a semicircular tool to carve out the track for the ball bearings.

Once the disks could rotate freely on each other, the only thing left was to carve out a space for the servo, Arduino, a pair of pots, and the wiring. The pots control the maximum speed of the monitor stand as well as provide a manual rotation control for when your phone is across the room.

[mobile_earth_explorer] wrote the Android app so up to five of these swiveling monitors can be controlled by just one Arduino; yes, that might be overkill for home or office use, but we’re sure it would be highly useful for some sort of presentation.

You can check out a few videos going over the conception and construction of [mobile_earth_explorer]’s monitor stands after the break.

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Using An Android As A Webserver

June 21, 2012 by Mike Szczys 25 Comments

In the latest episode of XDA TV [Adam Outler] turned his Android phone into a webserver. At first this might sound comical, but the ever-increasing power of our handhelds makes it a pretty legitimate option. It’s hard to come up with concrete uses off the top of our head, but we’re sure there’s value in being able to pull the phone out of your pocket and serve some content.

The app BotBrew Basil makes the installation process nearly automatic. It gives you point-and-click access to install the lighttpd webserver package and set the daemon to run automatically at boot time. That’s it! Of course you need to supply your own HTML to be served. [Adam] used an HTML5 website template for this.

Next you also need a way to resolve the address of the phone. In this case it’s assigned a static IP from the router, and a dynamic DNS service provides a link that maps to the router’s location. But since these phones are running Linux (at least on the lowest level) it should be pretty easy to add a cron job which will send IP address updates to the service if you want to take the ‘webserver’ out in the world with you. You can watch the entire video after the break.

Ironically this is a big hardware upgrade for [Adam’s] webserver. The previous version was running from an Evalbot.

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