I finally joined the 21st Century and got an Android phone. I like the Fusion; got it is as a pay-as-you-go, no contract phone (a contract seems to always abuse the consumer and protect the carrier). Of course, my interest in micro controllers didn't let me stop with merely possessing the phone, I wanted to control something with it. I found a great introductory book, "Making Android Accessories with IOIO" by Simon Monk that got me started. My favorite vendor, SparkFun, markets a micro controller board called IOIO (sounds like yoyo) that is designed to interface to the USB plug on an Android. There is so much potential with this fusion of touch screen display, GPS, bluetooth, Internet access and microprocessors. To harness this potential, I do have to add Java to my list of programming languages to master. I confess that it took me 20 hours to load and set up Java, Eclipse, all of the Android SDKs, IOIO libraries and to debug the whole affair (this is the life of an embedded programmer I suppose...this should be made more fool-proof!) The reward for all of that effort was successfully turning an LED on and off by pressing a button my my phone and seeing it change on the IOIO board that was bluetooth connected. There should be much more exciting projects to come!
Utube video [Link]
Links to tutorials and software [Link]
My other interests [Link]
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