Breakout Board – swan tron dot com

September 24, 2011

IOIO Servo Controller

I just doubled my Android Market presence with one fell swoop. IOIO project number two is in the books: IOIO Servo Controller.

This project is a one-off of the PowerSwitch Tail relay project I have out in the wild. I took the button out of the mix and implemented a slider bar…removed the relay and am now driving a hobby servo.

Displayed is the relative level (zero to one) of the slider, the slider itself, and a shameless plug. The onboard LED also fires with a brightness relative to the slider position…which I implemented in the coding and sort of left in there.

The basic concept was to get the PWM output configured correctly, in order to control the servo positioning…the slider function is pretty much just the stock slider from the Android Development docs, widened a bit for the sake of video capture. The rest was just mashing around the code I had out there…not too bad.

Check the thing in action:

This project is available for download in app form on the Android Market. Right next to my other guy…search for IOIO. I will toss the code on my GitHub account as well. Fun project…I may branch and see If I can do anything cool with a few servos. We’ll see.

Shoot any comments to joe(at)swantron(dot)com. I can help with any setup issues, if they may arise. Good luck…

August 26, 2011

Android 120V Controller

It was worth the wait…I now control 120V via my Android.

ioio android powerswitch tail 120V FTW — awesome project is awesome

I had a mostly sleepless night, again. I managed to figure out what I had been botching while trying to provide enough juice to my PowerSwitch Tail. Transistors and alligator clamps are out; extra pins are in.

Take a look at the (awful quality) video…on the main page, as the picture quality won’t grind loading to a halt.

I still need to toss some headers on the IOIO, and take some clips out of the picture for a better picture of what I did here. Look for that shortly, along with a snippet. Pretty straight forward, but we’ll have to see where this one ends up.

July 28, 2011

Android IOIO Digital Output

I am one coding session and one EE session away from having a pretty cool project to post. In the meantime, I am making some progress with the IOIO.

ioio android speaker project — +1 a bunch of wires

Eclipse and I are still having our issues, but the ADK is becoming less Greek to me. The next project should shed some light on what sort of possibilities IOIO presents.

I shot a video of one of my debugging tests. I eventually will be using an ‘open drain’ setup, in order to get 5V output, but am doing some testing at 3.3V. I hooked up an old speaker that I salvaged from a CRT tear-down to my test pins, to verify that my Android App was working.

Hit the jump to view said vid…
Continue reading “Android IOIO Digital Output”

May 7, 2011

IOIO Android Breakout Board

~~~~ WARNING: AWESOME ~~~~

My new thing has officially arrived. Both in the literal sense and philosophically. I love my Arduino, and I love my Android…now I can have the best of both.

Introducing, the IOIO breakout board…

I snagged this guy from SparkFun. You know how the Android is full of stuff? Accelerometers, touch screen, GPS receiver, WiFi…etc? Instead of having to start from scratch for each of my Arduino projects to introduce components, this board will allow me to use the Android/Java as the backbone of my code, instead of using Processing/C++. And that, my friends, is +++.

Take a look at this awful-picture-quality-having video:

Sorry about that…I had to use Katie’s old BlackBerry to record the demo. It leaves much to be desired.

Anyhow, so far I have just managed to get Eclipse configured, and have uncovered several gotchas. The biggest obstacle was getting the permissions worked out and linking the libraries properly. When in doubt, chmod -R 777 * and let it rip. We’ll see what comes of this…could be cool once I dust off my Java skills.

Of note: pretty sure I am the first person to get this working on a Droid 2, and likely the first to set this up on Linux. It just shipped yesterday, so the sky is the limit on this…I am very excited. Big props to Ytai and SparkFun.