External Text Display For Nexus One

July 1, 2011 by Noah Dunker 4 Comments

Nexus One External Display

[follower] prototyped a 2-line external display for his Nexus One using an Arduino with a USB Host Shield, and the Android Open Accessory Protocol. There are two basic software pieces at work: an Arduino sketch that handles displaying data sent from the phone, and a lightweight android app to detect the presence of the external screen and send data to it. As shown here, it diplays the time and the beginning of the most recently received SMS message.

This project coalesced from several other things [follower] had been working on with regards to USB accessories, background services, interfacing with the Arduino and handling SMS messages, so it’s modular and open-source. If you’re interested in mashing up microcontroller projects and your android phone, there’s plenty of stuff in this project to help you get off the ground.

As hacks go, this is very much a “because you can” sort of deal that’s designed to tie a bunch of cool things together. You’re unlikely to catch us carrying an LCD and breadboard around in our pockets any time soon, but it paves the way for some potentially fun phone accessories.

Google Android ADK Bluetooth Wireless Communications

June 30, 2011 by Mike Nathan 6 Comments

arduino_to_android_ADK_bluetooth_communications

Once the Google ADK was announced, the team over at [ElectFreaks] jumped right in and started experimenting to see what they could do with the new Arduino/Android interface. While the ADK was great for allowing the two devices to interact over a USB connection, they felt that the system would be far better if it allowed for wireless communications instead.

They added a Bluetooth Bee to their Arduino setup and got busy writing an Android application that uses the handset’s built in Bluetooth module to communicate using the ADK. The application configures your phone to act as either a client or server when pairing. This does not affect data flow, as communications are bi-directional, it merely decides which device is placed in discoverable mode.

As you can see in the second part of their post, once the phone and Arduino are connected, it is quite easy to send serial data back and forth between the two devices.

As of right now, their Bluetooth API is in Beta, so things might still be a bit rough around the edges. They do encourage anyone to download and modify the code, which is freely available on their site.

Satellite Tracking By Shining A Laser Into Space

June 11, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 36 Comments

[Shingo Hisakawa] sent in a tip for a for a neat little box called the Levistone that tracks the Internation Space Station with a laser. His video log goes though all the steps for this great little project.

[Shingo] originally planned to pull orbital data down from NORAD and send that to an ArduinoBT board with ethernet, GPS and compass modules. In the original plan, the Arduino would do the orbit calculations and point the laser using a few servos. There wasn’t much success with making an Arduino do all the work, so the an Android phone stood in for the GPS, compass and connection to the web. The duty of calculating the location of the ISS using GPS and orbital elements was moved onto the Amazon EC2 cloud. The final product looks great, even if it’s impossible to record the beam for the video.

With the ability to calculate the azimuth and elevation of the ISS from any point in the world, [Shingo] came up with SightSpaceStation, a neat mashup of his data and Google Maps. There are also iOS and Android apps for a nice piece of work in augmented reality. It’s a great project that would really compliment the ISS desk lamp we covered a few days ago.

Ubuntu Laika – An Android Phone Pen Testing Platform

June 9, 2011 by Mike Nathan 11 Comments

laika_screenshot

Once [Ruan] over at AndroidClone heard that Android devices were capable of running a full Linux environment, he started contemplating all of the things he might be able to do with a full Linux OS in his pocket.

He decided that a portable penetration testing platform would be great to have on hand, so he got busy installing Ubuntu 10.10 on his Lenovo LePhone. Once he had it up and running, he stripped out all of the unnecessary fluff and added some common tools such as Wireshark, Nmap, and Kismet, among others. He says it easily runs side by side with Android, allowing you to switch between the Ubuntu install and your standard Android applications with ease.

While this all started out as a proof of concept, he has continued to refine the project, releasing several new versions along the way. If you are interested in giving it a try, he has installation instructions available in the AndroidClone forums.

[thanks Stephen]

Tablet-controlled Disco Droid

June 9, 2011 by Mike Nathan 13 Comments

disco_droid_adk_control

We have seen a few neat Google ADK projects pop up since its announcement a few weeks back, and this one is already on the list of our favorites.

YouTube user [chrisjrelliot] has put together a great hack demonstrating the ADK’s power and how easy it can be to control devices in real time with an Android-powered device.

He hacked apart an Android figure (naturally) and fitted it with some LED eyes as well as four servos. The servos are used to rotate the head, body, and arms of his Disco Droid, all of which can be controlled via his Android-powered tablet. As you can see in the video below, he is able to control the Droid’s actions in real time with a few simple swipes of his finger. One thing we did notice is that his tablet is not connected to anything via wires, so we are assuming that there’s a Bluetooth module hidden away somewhere in the mix.

While the video is a bit short on details, [Chris] promises that source code and build plans will be published in short order.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwvkJVUECrg&w=470]

IOIO Now Supports Android Open Accessory

June 9, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 9 Comments

After the announcement of the Android Open Accessory ADK, [Ytai] decided he should get the the ADK running on the IOIO Android breakout board.

The first batch of Android ADK boards sold for about $400. While that price has come down considerably, the IOIO is still cheaper and smaller. [Ytai] put the source and all the technical info on his wiki.

Interestingly, this beta build is a little more capable than the Google offering. The IOIO supports the Android Debug Bridge, so it’s able to work with any Android device made since the beginning of time. The IOIO will try to communicate with the device using the Open Accessory standard because of the much better throughput and latency, but will seamlessly fall back to ADB if the device doesn’t support Open Accessory. Open Accessory boards are only comparable with devices running Android 2.3.4 and higher, so it looks like we’ve got a standard breakout board for the $99 Android tablets that fly off the shelves during Christmas.

[Ytai] has gotten a few of his projects on Hack a Day, like his PICMAN prototyping setup and his awesome 2 foot POV globe, so we’re happy to see this very skilled builder finally get his Hack a Day hat trick and enters the ranks of giants like [Sprite_tm]. If you’ve got a great build, send it in and you might be able to join the pantheon of great builders.

Trobot: Kickstarting The 6-axis Minature Robot Arm

June 7, 2011 by Mike Szczys 10 Comments

Having already made it to three hardware development versions, [Toby Baumgartner] is looking for some financial backing to make version four of this robot arm possible.

He’s modelling the arm after much larger ABB industrial robots. Like those, it mounts on a stationary base, and features movement along six axes. The first couple of iterations even used ABB Software’s RobotStudio for control. This is the same software used by the full-sized robots, and features a special design language to integrate the robots into just about any production facility.

We don’t think the need for high-end software used with these small manipulator arms is very great, but we could see the finished product used for small-scale assembly line work some day. In the mean time these might be useful in your own projects. [Toby] has been using an mBed microcontroller board as the hardware driver. It communicates with the computer via an Ethernet connection and he’s even working on an Android interface right now.

Check out a video demonstration of version 2 and 3 embedded after the break.

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