Monday, October 10, 2011

Welcome


As part of an Open call for the Google developer day, I was selected to create a demonstration using the new Android ADK.

I have been working on an Android app to calculate the probability of seeing a rainbow (using your current location and weather). In this project, rather than displaying the chance of seeing a rainbow on the screen of the phone, it will instead be projected onto a wall. To keep the cost of this project reasonable, a slide projector will be used to project the image. The particular slide to present (e.g. a rainbow graphic, a sun graphic, etc) will be selected by advancing the slide projector appropriately, using the ADK - I will replace the advance switch on the projector remote with a relay controlled by one of the digital out connections on the ADK. The entire device (phone connected to an ADK connected to a slide projector) will also sit on a circular plastic disc. The orientation of the disc will be controlled by a stepper motor, with the stepper motor (and hence the orientation of the disc and the projector) also controlled by the ADK. This will allow the rainbow to be projected in the appropriate direction where one should look to see it (a rainbow is always observed in the opposite direction to the sun), feedback on the orientation will be provided using the compass in the phone.

You can read the proposal I submitted here

In this blog, I will detail my efforts at building the device. The GDD is in 28 days, let's hope it gets finished in time!!!

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