[chbot] What we did on Wednesday 15th September 2010

[davechcr at dchurcher.com]

  On 17/09/2010 10:02 a.m., Richard Jones wrote:
> I also spent a fair bit of time looking at a Samsung Galaxy S phone 
> which caused me to wonder which phone would be the most mobile 
> platform robot friendly? Certainly the Samsung with its micro USB port 
> could easily bring out friendly IO to an AVR or Parallax board.

  I've been playing with the Amarino toolkit 
(http://www.amarino-toolkit.net/). It's a neat way of accessing all the 
sensors on an Android phone (compass, accelerometer, orientation, 
magnetic field, light sensor, proximity sensor) without having to learn 
the whole Android platform. It can respond to the phone ringing and SMS 
too, and I think with some extra plugins it could do voice recognition, 
GPS, and wireless Internet as well.

  It communicates with an Arduino via Bluetooth; you could use other 
microcontrollers as well but there's a pre-coded receiver module for 
Arduino. All the robot control logic stays on the microcontroller, it's 
just an easy way to route sensor data etc. from the phone to the 
microcontroller.

I will bring a demo along to the next meeting if I can make it.

Regards,
David