IOIO, another cool physical computing project
Over at Engineer Blogs, I found out about another cool project for connecting computers up with the real world—the IOIO (pronounced yo-yo): An Interview with Ytai Ben-Tsvi, Inventor of the IOIO.
Basically, it is a $50 IO board for an Android phone, using either USB or Bluetooth connection, controllable with a Java API from an Android 1.5 or later device. It has a PIC24F microcontroller providing 48 I/O pins, which have the usual sorts of capabilities (PWM, I2C, SPI, …). You can use it in much the same way you would use an Arduino, except that you need an Android device to talk to it.
This is a plus and a minus, as the Android phones come with a fair amount of compute power and some powerful software (like face recognition software), but they cost a lot also, and you wouldn’t want to tie up your phone in a dedicated project (a $25 Arduino board is cheaper to embed than a phone and a $50 IOIO board).
I don’t think that the Android phone+IOIO is quite as exciting as the $35 Raspberry Pi if you need cell-phone-level compute power, but it looks like a good way to make cell-phone-controlled gadgets.
Tagged: Android, Arduino, IOIO, PIC24F, Raspberry Pi
