Arduino Mega ADK and Google Accessories Development Kit

Arduino has just released the Arduino Mega ADK board. This is very interesting for several reasons.

Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It’s intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments.

Google has recently released the Android Open Accessory Development Kit on the Arduino reference architecture.  The Android Open Accessory development kit allows external USB hardware (an Android USB accessory) to interact with an Android-powered device in a special “accessory” mode. Basically this opens the door to the creation of a wide range of accessories from anybody.

And the development is accessible to many, as the Arduino ADK board alone costs €59 ($83) and a wide range of sensors and extensions can be plugged and integrated to the board. A complete Arduino ADK Sensor Kit costs 249 euros and it contains a lot of stuffs to play and experiment with.

Now, a short demonstration of Arduino is below:

And the introduction of the Google ADK from the Google I/O keynote, please fast forward at 38:50:

And the full technical and long intro is here:

An intro book to the world of Arduino is Arduino Cookbook by Michael Margolis. And the Google reference is here Android Open Accessory Development Kit.

And thanks to Chris Anderson weblink, posted in Google+,  there is a good presentation by Nick Pinkston, Founder, CloudFab on Hardware is the new Software. From the intro to the video: We see the power of cheap cloud hosting, OSS, and incubators to make building a web app cheap, and now the same is happening to hardware. The means of production is becoming democratized and agile hardware startups are popping up to solve problems.

It has never been that easy to create and explore with Hardware, Software, Mobile Phones, Sensors and Internet. We are going to see very interesting things in this near future.

UPDATES: Today, the first official iPhone hacker cable + Arduino interface board is out! Not quite as neat as the Android ADK, but very welcome, see the Redpark Breakout Pack for Arduino and iOS.

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