Thursday, January 05, 2012

The Hayward household being "tech savvy"

Reviewing the new Sony Tablet S for cnet.com.au has been a very interesting and rewarding exercise for us. As the Sony Tablet utilises the Google “Android” operating system at version 3.2 or “Honeycomb” as Google likes to refer to it, and being open source, there is an amazing amount of information available for nerdy types (like me ... hhmnnn) to take advantage of.

I like to tinker in the programing side of things where possible. While digging around on the Net I found a cute little device put out by sparkfun.com and that I bought here in Australia from www.littlebirdelectronics.com called the IOIO (or pronounced “yoyo”).




To control the IOIO board I have had to load the Android SDK development environment on my Lenovo laptop. With this, Google have chosen to use the very powerful ‘Eclipse’ IDE.

Setting up the development environment is not as easy as say the Microsoft Visual Studio development environment for Windows however there are plenty of straight forward instructions available on the Net to guide you, especially if you are familiar at all with cross compiling development platforms.

My son Alex is very keen on his DJ setup that he has been creating, much to the annoyance of our neighbours I fear. Anyhow, with the Sony Tablet S and with Android operating system, there are a number of apps available that he plans to take avantage of including DJ studios, mixing consoles, spectrum analysers etc. One of the areas that DJs love to use is lighting and fog effects. We plan to use the Sony Tablet S, coupled with the IOIO board to control Alex's lights, fog machines etc directly with this little device coupled with an interfacing board we will be developing. Much fun to be had:)
The Android "Eclipse" environment running on my Lenovo laptop.
Click on the image for a larger view.
The Android development environment includes a development machine based based "emulator" where you can run up applications on your development machine rather than bothering with the upload process onto the Sony Tablet S, although doing this is not at all difficult. Your development machine can be either Linux, iMac or Windows. I have run mine up on my Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit Lenovo laptop. 
The obligatory "Hello, World" running on my Lenovo laptop.
Click on the image to get a larger view.


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