Joe Desbonnet informs us of the release by Google of their Android Open Accessory Development Kit (ADK). Interestingly, the ADK is Arduino based!
The Android Open Accessory Development Kit (ADK) provides an implementation of an Android USB accessory that is based on the Arduino open source electronics prototyping platform, the accessory’s hardware design files, code that implements the accessory’s firmware, and the Android application that interacts with the accessory. The hardware design files and code are contained in the ADK package download.
Google made this announcement at the ongoing Google IO Developer’s Conference.
Check the ADK Dev Guide page for all the details!
Thanks Joe! Via the contact form.
Hopefully we will get some of the opensource hardware companies building some of these soon. The supplier linked from the document expensive (at least to me)
http://www.rt-shop.sakura.ne.jp/rt-shop/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=2731
Microchip have just released kit for the Accessories Development Kit:
http://www.microchip.com/stellent/idcplg?IdcService=SS_GET_PAGE&nodeId=2018&mcparam=en553929
The Microchip press release says the PIC24F version is available “today” and the PIC32 version to be available Q3. But their online store has estimated availability for the PIC24F version 6 July 2011. Cost $80 for both versions.
It will be interesting to see if TI will do an Android ADK. If so I bet it will be a good bit cheaper :)
This is all very exciting. Thank you Google.
Apple and Microsoft are the evil empires.