ElectroDroid – Your Android Electronic Reference App

February 10, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 39 Comments

Earlier this week, fellow Hack a Day-er [Mike Nathan] reviewed Adafruit’s new iPhone/iPad app Circuit Playground. The comments on [Mike]’s review turned to suggesting ElectroDroid as an alternative to Circuit Playground. Surprisingly, Hack a Day authors actually pay attention to the comments, so I’ve decided to throw my hat into the ring and offer up my review of ElectroDroid. For purposes of full disclosure, I have to add that I paid the $2.59 donation for a copy of ElectroDroid without ads, and have had no contact with the developers.

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Control Android With A Projector And Kinect

January 25, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 5 Comments

If you’re going to build a giant touch screen, why not use an OS that is designed for touch interfaces, like Android? [Colin] had the same idea, so he connected his phone to a projector and a Kinect.

Video is carried from [Colin]’s Galaxy Nexus to the projector via an MHL connection. Getting the Kinect to work was a little more challenging, though. The Kinect is connected to a PC running Simple Kinect Touch. The PC converts the data from the Kinect into TUIO commands that are received using TUIO for Android.

In order for the TUIO commands to be recognized as user input, [Colin] had to compile his own version of Android. It was a lot of work, but using an OS designed for touch interface seems much better than all the other touch screen hacks that start from the ground up.

You can check out [Colin]’s demo after the break. Sadly, there are no Angry Birds.

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Remote Entry Via Android And Launchpad

January 24, 2012 by Kevin Dady 8 Comments

[MarkoeZ] had an issue with keys breaking off in his door lock, and while normal people might try to simply replace the lock all together, [MarkoeZ] decided to do it the “Hackaday” way by adding a bluetooth lock to his door. His door is already setup where someone can walk up to it, page an internal intercom and have someone buzz you in. From the inside the intercom was modded with a TI Launchpad with a “deal extreme” bluetooth module and relay.

Access is granted by the use of an android phone running “BT_Serial_Tester” which is a simple app that allows you to send characters over bluetooth. Just enter a pin, grab the door before the buzzer times out, and you’re in! A starting point for the MSP code and schematics are available on his blog. Join us after the break for a quick demonstration video.

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Controlling An LED Matrix With An Android Phone

January 23, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 13 Comments

Even though everyone with a smart phone has a small, powerful computer in their pocket, we haven’t seen many applications of this portable processing power that use the built-in camera. [Michael] decided to change this and built an LED matrix that displays the data coming from the phone’s camera.

For the build, [Michael] used two 32×32 LED panels from Adafruit along with an IOIO and an Arduino. To build the Android app, [Michael] used the Android OpenCV computer vision library that grabs an image from the Android camera and downsamples it to 64×32 pixels. This data is transferred over a serial connection from the phone to the IOIO and again from the IOIO to the Arduino. Even though each frame is 1024 bytes, [Michael] still gets around four frames per second on his LED matrix display.

After the break you can check out the results of [Michael]’s build. The video is a little choppy because of the frame rate issue, but it’s still an interesting build in the Android software development category.

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Controlling A Cute Ikea Night Light With Android On The Cheap

January 19, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 12 Comments

When [trandi]’s wife saw a cute night light at Ikea, she had to have it. She actually bought several of these for when her husband would inevitably crack one open and start tinkering with the microcontroller inside. The inevitable hack is pretty cool, and also gives us some ideas for interfacing with Android on the cheap.

The build started as an Ikea Spoka night light, an adorable anthropomorphized night light with a squishy silicone skin. Inside the Spoka are a dozen tri-color LEDs that [trandi] can cycle through with the push of a button. After deciding to control the lights inside the Spoka with an Android phone he reached for an IOIO Android breakout board. Fate intervened and [trandi] ended up with a ridiculously cheap Bluetooth modules that provides a simple serial connection to other Bluetooth devices.

The build reuses the blue, red, orange LEDs in the night light but replaces the no-name 8-pin micro with an ATtiny2313. [Trandi] wrote a small Android app to control the color over a Bluetooth serial connection. Check out his demo after the break.

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Turn Your Camera Phone Into A Geiger Counter

January 15, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 96 Comments

Next time you’re waiting in the security line in an airport, why don’t you pull out your smartphone and count all the radiation being emitted by those body scanners and x-rays? There’s an app for that, courtesy of Mr. [Rolf-Dieter Klein].

The app works by blocking all the light coming into a phone’s camera sensor with a piece of tape or plastic. Because high energy radiation will cause artifacts on the CMOS camera sensor inside the phone, radiation will be captured as tiny specks of white light. The title picture for this post was taken from a camera phone at the Helmholtz Research Center in Munich being bathed in 10 Sieverts per hour of Gamma radiation from the decay of Cesium-137.

We have to note that blips of ‘bad data’ from a CMOS camera sensor aren’t unusual. These can come from electrical weirdness in the sensor itself or even the heat from the battery. [Rolf]’s app takes a reading of the noise floor and subtracts it from the counter. Radioactive decay resulting in Beta particles such as the Potassium-40 in bananas or the Uranium in granite counter tops don’t really register, although [Rolf] did have some success with Potassium chloride and a long measurement time. Still though, it’s a really cool way to turn a phone into a tricorder.

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Phone-controlled Light Display Is Simple And Fun

December 28, 2011 by Mike Nathan No comments

android-phone-light-toy

[Ytai Ben-Tsvi] wrote in to share a little holiday project that he and friend [Al Linke] put together, a dynamic light display that takes its cues from his Android-powered smartphone.

The display fits in a vase that sits in [Ytai’s] family room, and while it wasn’t exactly cheap to build, it sure looks nice. The vase is full of feathery decorative bits which help hide an addressable RGB LED strip. The lights are controlled by an IOIO board which the pair tucked away inside the vase as well.

The IOIO board was also fitted with a USB Bluetooth dongle, allowing it to communicate with just about any handset running a relatively recent flavor of the Android OS. When connected, the phone samples its surroundings with the onboard camera, commanding the vase to mix the colors seen by the phone into its twinkling display.

As you can see in the video below it works pretty well when used with solid, brightly colored objects. While just a fun toy in its current form, [Ytai] and [Al] have more than a few ideas on how to expand its usability.

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