My tablet arrived today. Looks like a neat little device, well worth the bucks. One oddity is I can't seem to find the camera app -- it claims to be installed but there's no icon or menu selection for it. In any case that's not much of a priority for me.
What is far more interesting is that I took apart that silver breakout box Bill Henning mentioned, and in addition to the 2 USB and RJ45 connectors there are pads on the circuit board labeled GND, TX, RX, and 3v3. Further snooping via teh mighty GOOG reveals that many of these devices do indeed have serial ports, and while using them at the application level involves replacing the linux kernal and changing some settings it should be possible to get that working for homemade apps. That would make this device extremely useful.
OK I found the camera application and the camera does work. I need to get a SD card and break the serial port out with a 3v3-RS232 level converter (which I just happen to have an extra kit for lying around fortunately).
I will be very interested to see what you manage to do with it, localroger. It is nice to be able to experiment with something that doesn't trigger a financial panic if it gets tweaked.
Since the first tablet was promised to my daughter, I ordered a second one, almost the same:
The biggest leaps in Android occur with 2.1 which allows installing the Flash player, and 2.2 which comes with Flash support built-in. Android 2.2 also includes the Google v8 JavaScript engine which is probably the finest implementation of JavaScript in the known universe.
I'm fairly sure with 1.6 you can install the Kindle app which is useful.
With Android 1.6 as supplied I do notice that the YouTube app supplied with it crashes very reliably. Simpler flash apps seem to work OK.
I really think the key to using this thing for our purposes here is the serial port. It has occurred to me that all I really need to do is break out the pads in the expansion module to a header compatible with a PropPlug. If I add the 3v3 pin to the end per Morpheus I can then use Bill's serial adapter if need be. Of course the pad won't be able to assert RES but that's probably a feature, not a bug :-)
The pad should be able to communicate with a Propeller directly without voltage conversions via serial. Considering its price and that the pad has a nice display, large RAM, touch screen, wifi, and can read and write USB memory devices, it could be a really nice an cheap bridge between embedded/robotic projects and some of these more complicated peripherals.
Android 1.6 will probably be fine if I can get a kernal that supports the serial API. I do think this is worth pursuing.
Comments
What is far more interesting is that I took apart that silver breakout box Bill Henning mentioned, and in addition to the 2 USB and RJ45 connectors there are pads on the circuit board labeled GND, TX, RX, and 3v3. Further snooping via teh mighty GOOG reveals that many of these devices do indeed have serial ports, and while using them at the application level involves replacing the linux kernal and changing some settings it should be possible to get that working for homemade apps. That would make this device extremely useful.
Since the first tablet was promised to my daughter, I ordered a second one, almost the same:
http://cgi.ebay.com/7-Notebook-WiFi-Google-Android-2-0-MID-Tablet-PC-/230544650415?pt=US_Tablets&hash=item35ad8830af
1.6 seemed perfect for what we needed it to do. I have no idea if 2.0 will make any difference, but I couldn't pass up the opportunity to see.
I'm fairly sure with 1.6 you can install the Kindle app which is useful.
I really think the key to using this thing for our purposes here is the serial port. It has occurred to me that all I really need to do is break out the pads in the expansion module to a header compatible with a PropPlug. If I add the 3v3 pin to the end per Morpheus I can then use Bill's serial adapter if need be. Of course the pad won't be able to assert RES but that's probably a feature, not a bug :-)
The pad should be able to communicate with a Propeller directly without voltage conversions via serial. Considering its price and that the pad has a nice display, large RAM, touch screen, wifi, and can read and write USB memory devices, it could be a really nice an cheap bridge between embedded/robotic projects and some of these more complicated peripherals.
Android 1.6 will probably be fine if I can get a kernal that supports the serial API. I do think this is worth pursuing.