When the cats away, the mice will play. But…. what’s the cat doing when YOU’RE away? That question led Tris of CantHack, a group of geeks from Canterbury, UK, to develop PiPurr. Tris explains, “PiPurr is a simple client-server solution. … Read more
The ChameleonOS dev group has posted the latest version of their open source ROMS for Android devices. They describe: Chameleon OS (or ChaOS for short) is a custom Android ROM that gives the user more control than they can experience … Read more
Here’s an app which purports to turn your radio equipped Android device into a SDR. It called SDR Touch and is available for free download from the developer’s website. According to the developers, its designed to work with the familiar … Read more
Google engineers J.J Barrons and Joe Fernandez have developed this lawn irrigation system. Dubbed Irrduino it uses Android, Ardiuno, Python, Dart and the Google App Engine. The project hardware details can be found on JoesHacks blog. The source code can … Read more
Kerimil over at Arduino forum posted this simple how to on controlling an Arduino board with an Android mobile device. He describes, “The circuit is just a Bluetooth module, Arduino UNO, LED, resistor and some wires. The LED can be … Read more
Here’s an interesting and fun use of the MSP430 and your Android phone: robotic tank control. This project by Mike adds a Bluetooth transceiver module MSP430 and mounts this along with a motor drive booster pack and battery on a … Read more
Odrioid is yet another tiny board capable of running Linux or Android. It’s only 48mm x 52mm, yet it features a 1.7 GHz quad core Cortex A9 processor, the Mali-400 quad core GPU, and 2 GBs of DDR2. Unfortunately there … Read more
Anton Gorbunov did a teardown of his Nexus 7 dock and discovered that there are only some passive components on the PCB. He notes that with some pogopins it should be easy to make your own Dock. Via the contact … Read more
The Ouya is a soon to be released $99 gaming console. It was funded in August, 2012 via Kickstarter to the tune of $8+ million, and hardware should be shipping starting in April. The console is based on Android Jelly … Read more
At the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) Ford announced their OpenXC project, a combination of open source hardware and software that lets you extend your vehicle with custom applications and pluggable modules. It uses standard, well-known tools to open up … Read more
Dolabra connected his Bus Pirate to the Nexus 7 tablet. All it takes is an OTG USB cable and a serial app to get your Bus Pirate going. I have been playing around with USB OTG on my new nexus … Read more
Mats Engstrom writes that he’s had positive experience with the ElectroDroid app. He’s had it installed in his phone for some time now finds it useful. “In addition to a lot of pinouts and lists of nice-to-have info the app … Read more
A few weeks ago we posted that the FT311D Android Open Accessory (AOA) ICs didn’t support AOA 2.0 devices. This has been rectified in the latest silicon revision (rev C.). The device required a change to enable connection to the … Read more
In this just released video from the Open Web App Security Project (OWASP) AppSecUSA 2011 conference held in Minneapolis, MN, Mike Park discusses the insecurity of Android “.apk” apps and covers the ease with which Android Apps can be reversed, … Read more
We designed a breakout board for the FT311D Android Open Accessory (AOA) ICs. We got the prototypes in our workshop, and in the free PCB drawer. Only thing missing is for FTDI to start selling them. In this waiting period … Read more
Here’s an open source project by Dimitar Gamishev which demonstrates how to communicate using I2C in Android applications. As shown in this project Dimitar uses this code with an A13-OLinuXino running Android to drive relays and read ADCs and GPIOs … Read more
FTDI released the FT311D USB host IC for easy communication with Android devices. It features 7 GPIOs, one I2C peripheral, one UART, one SPI, and 4 PWM peripherals. The device acts as a USB host to an Android device, … Read more
Olimex is hard at work to roll out the A13 based OLinuXino by September. In the latest news they were able to flash the device with a custom Android build. Dimitar Gamishev learned that we have A13-OLinuXino prototypes and came … Read more
Adam unboxes the Meizu Mx and gets root access using the Bus Pirate. The phone is torn down to the main-board to gain access to the UART test points on the board. After that it was a simple matter of … Read more
Rohit de Sa has an Android phone with a feature known as USB On The Go (OTG), allowing the phone to act as either a host or slave. Thus, it can interface with various USB devices such as mice, keyboards, … Read more
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