Android Accessories with SparkFun's IOIO board

Just got a brand new IOIO for Android (pronounced "yo-yo") from SparkFun electronics. It is an a Android Open Accessory compatible development board, which allows external USB hardware to interact with an Android-powered device in an accessory mode without any special licensing or fees, unlike Apple’s Made For iPod (MFi) program. Pretty cool stuff!

The accessory mode does not require the Android device to support USB Host mode, which most of them don’t really do at this time. The Android Open Accessory Development Kit (ADK) APIs support both Android powered devices that act as a conventional USB host, and non-host Android devices that communicate with USB hosts or Android USB Accessories. Devices that support accessory mode can be filtered using a <uses-feature> element in the application's Android manifest.

In accessory mode the Android phone or tablet acts as the USB Device and the accessory acts as the USB Host. This means that the accessory is the bus master and provides power, which also poses some challenges for those developing accessories (e.g. deal with battery, power management etc).

Back to the IOIO board, it supports wired or Bluetooth communication and enables virtually any Android 1.5+ device to control external circuits using different interfaces, from within Android's applications. Thanks to a 48 I/O pins – Digital Input/Output, PWM, Analog Input, I2C, SPI and UART control – you can hook up the IOIO with a variety of devices, such as sensors, motors, actuators etc.

Here are the pieces of hardware I used:

• An Android HTC Inspire 4G
• IOIO for Android board
• USB cable that is compatible with your Android device
• 5-15V power supply with at least 1A of current.

The steps:

1. You need to power the IOIO board. I bought these suggested parts: PRT-08612 (JST Right Angle Connector), TOL-08734 (adapter Barrel Jack to 2-pin JS), and a power supply TOL-08269 from SparkFun. Then, I soldered the JST connector on the back of the board (see picture below).
   
2. Install Eclipse (the Java developers version is sufficient) and ADT.
3. Complete the Hello World Tutorial of Android. If you are familiar with Android development, you may want to skip this step.
4. Run your first Hello IOIO application; this tutorial will get you up to speed. The app displays a toggle button on the screen, which allows turn on and off an LED on the board.

JST connector soldered on the back of the IOIO board.

Now, you are ready to build the next big thing in the Android accessories’ world.

Here is a video showing a very cool implementation of an object follower robot using IOIO:

Resources:

• IOIO wiki
• IOIO discussion group
• Many more videos of IOIO action, hosted by MIT, can be found here

Everyone's against Plastic Credit Cards: the uphill battle to make payment methods smarter

The first contender: the NFC, or Near Field Communication. It was the new buzzword in the mobile space, with the promise of turning your mobile phone into a wallet. Google, Nokia, RIM, Vodafone, Orange, Visa, and MasterCard are some of the companies pushing for NFC support. 

But as expected, NFC is facing a lot of challenges to become a mainstay technology for brick and mortar payments. The infrastructure is not ready yet and the solutions require an entire new ecosystem and infrastructure investments such as merchants having POS terminals capable of communicating with consumers' NFC-enabled mobile devices (mobile, smart tags, Visa PayWave / MasterCard PayPass contactless smart cards, etc) to carry out purchase transactions.

Another big drawback is the iPhone's lack of support for NFC and that will continue to hurt the adoption of NFC for mobile payments, particularly in the US.

Moving on. The growing and increasingly crowded mobile payment ecosystem also has the cloud-based mobile payment solutions that require only downloadable applications for both consumers and retailers, and may make things much easier. Among them, PayPal’s in-store payment service, Dwolla, Square Card Case, to cite few. Together, they come with innovative business models, undercutting fees that merchants currently pay to accept the traditional networks' cards and offering a vast array of value added services. This way of payment has been gaining a lot of momentum lately, specially with PayPal's Home Depot Pilot. 

The list goes on and includes many other methods of payments available, such as QR code scanning, iOS and Android point-of-sale credit card dongles (Square, Intuit's GoPayment etc), SMS, carrier billing etc.

So, NFC is neither the only one more option for enabling payments at the physical point-of-sale nor the most cost-effective solution out there. So, why card issuers are pushing for this? Well, all are working very hard to capture market share and the last thing they want in this case, is to see retailers moving to software-only Dwolla or PayPal that renders them obsolete. 

Who will get traction?

It may be that the killer app or disruptive technology is still to come.