Android Controlled T-shirt Cannon

July 16, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 33 Comments

Every year, Qualcomm hosts the “Battle of the Schools.” This year the goal was to build homemade contraptions that would be judged on how cool they are. [Doug DeCarme], [Shaver Deyerle], and [Zach Rattner] – three Qualcomm employees at Virginia Tech – built an Android controlled t-shirt cannon for this event and ended up tying with Michigan State for first place.

The cannon is built around an Arduino Uno and a BlueSMiRF Bluetooth modem. [Doug DeCarme], the Android developer of the group, put together an app that would fire each barrel independently. The valves for the cannon are just 150 PSI inline sprinkler valves, bought from the local Home Depot. From the project breakdown, the team spent less than $150 on entire project.

From the video, we see that they’re getting some pretty good distance firing t-shirts at 160 PSI. Although we question the wisdom of using PVC as a pressure vessel holding 160 PSI, changing the PVC to a proper air reservoir wouldn’t be that hard.

IOIO Upgrades Get A Bit Easier

July 13, 2011 by Mike Szczys 2 Comments

The IOIO, a breakout board for Android phones that predates the Android Developer Kit hardware, is a now a little bit easier to upgrade. That’s because [Ytai’s] IOIO manager app just his the Android market. The PIC24F that sits proudly on top of the board has always been running a bootloader, but for security reasons it is programmed to only talk to apps that have been officially signed. Now that there’s an app that meets this qualification, you can upgrade the firmware from your phone without the need for an external programmer.

What about the bootloader itself? Surely that will need upgrades over time, right? Well, yes. [Ytai’s] announcement today also came with an option for upgrading the bootloader but with one caveat. You’ll need two IOIO boards to complete the upgrade. One connects to the phone and becomes a programmer, while the other lays back and waits for a refreshing code flash.

Character LCD Screen Add-on For Android Devices

July 12, 2011 by Mike Szczys 10 Comments

Here’s an Android accessory project that adds a secondary LCD display. It utilizes the Android Open Accessory Development Kit standard to connect the 16×2 character LCD as a USB device. It pairs an app on the phone which runs transparently with firmware for the ATmega2560-based Arduino compatible board you see to the left. The app launches as soon as the auxiliary hardware is connected and is responsible for determining which lines of text are pushed out to the LCD. The example code displays the current time on the top line, and scrolls incoming text messages as they are received.

This is a good way to get your feet wet with the ADK hardware. We’ve already seen it used for larger displays like this LED marquee, but this smaller test project doesn’t require much hardware setup. Chances are you either already have an Arduino and character LCD on hand, or can easily borrow which makes this an easy weekend project.

One note on that Arduino compatible board; it’s called a Freakduino ADK but we couldn’t figure out if it’s a Freak Labs product or not. If you have some insight about that, please leave a comment.

Running Android On Large Touch Screen Displays

July 11, 2011 by Mike Nathan 24 Comments

32_inch_android_touch_screen_display

Forget Microsoft Surface, what do you think about having a 32-inch Android-powered touchscreen display in your living room? That possibility might not be too far off, thanks to the engineers over at SKR Technology in Japan.

Primarily a company that designs and builds digital signage, they were approached by several customers who wanted a large screen device that had multi-touch functionality similar to a smartphone. Since they frequently work with Windows, they tried building a solution around Windows 7, but it just didn’t function as smoothly as they would like. Instead they turned towards Android, but were disappointed to find out that none of their suppliers supported the OS.

Instead of scrapping the project, they build their own interface that allows an Android-powered device to interact with multi-touch displays. As you can see in the video embedded below the display works quite well, mirroring everything on the Android device’s screen.

While the product is not yet available commercially, we should see it come to market later this year. We hope to see an open source version sometime in the future as well, even if we can’t quite afford a 32” touch panel display.

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Bluescripts Makes Bluetooth Control From Android A Bit Easier

July 8, 2011 by Mike Szczys 11 Comments

Here’s a way to gain control of your projects using an Android device. Bluescripts is a free app available in the Android market that makes it a bit easier to make interfaces to send customizable messages. If you have a Bluetooth receiver in your project, connecting to it is as easy as putting the MAC address into an XML file on the Android device. Each tag in that file has a name, as well as the address of the target and the message that should be sent. On the receiving end, you just need to make sure your project hardware is ready to receive an ASCII message and act based on what comes through.

Check out the demonstration video after the break. Perhaps it’s not as cool as you could do if you were writing your own Android program, but we can’t think of anything we’ve seen that makes an Android interface this quick and easy.

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Use Bluetooth To Open Your Garage And Start Your Car Remotely

July 7, 2011 by Mike Nathan 19 Comments

bluetooth_remote_garage_opener_and_car_starter

Instructables user [tcollinsworth] is a big fan of his Android smart phone. He practically carries it with him everywhere, so he figured it would be cool to integrate as many of his home electronics with the phone as possible. His garage door openers seemed like easy enough targets, and while he was in the garage, he decided to hack his car’s remote starter as well.

He put together a small circuit that allows him to trigger any device via an application called Daisy On/Off, made specifically for the Bluetooth board he selected. One set of pins were wired to the garage door opener’s terminals, and the other to his remote start key fob. Once he had everything connected up, he packaged his components in a project box courtesy of his MakerBot. With that finished, he put together a simple interface in the Daisy application which can start his car or open the garage with a single button press.

It should be mentioned that [tcollinsworth] works for Daisy, so the reasoning behind his choice of components and Android applications is an obvious one. That said, schematics for the Daisy Bluetooth board are available online and the device can be controlled using BlueTerm, so you can feel free to roll your own implementation if you wish.

Our only nagging thought is that the system should probably include a feedback circuit that relays messages to the phone, indicating that the door is indeed open and that the car has been started. Pocket dialing your car to start without opening the garage first would definitely be a bad thing.

Check out the video below to see the system in action.

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Voice Controlled Robot Controlled By An Android Phone

July 5, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 2 Comments

[Jeff] sent in a build of a voice controlled robot he just finished based on the Android ADK and an iRobot Create.

The robot is able to obey voice commands telling it where to go. Currently the robot responds to forward, reverse, left, right, stop, and ‘whistle while you work.’ It’s a creative use of the Android ADK with some obvious applications, but this project really shines with the write up on instructables. It’s rare that we’ve seen a project so well documented; it’s a great project for someone who wants to get their feet wet in the world of robotics.

[Jeff]’s write up goes through the steps of hooking up the ADK board to iRobot and providing all the electronic necessities. [Jeff] graciously provided the code for his robot if anyone would like to add to his project.

The ultimate goal [Jeff] is currently working towards is something akin to a TurtleBot, while keeping the voice control of the robot. In all, a very nice project.