You may think of Android as an OS for phones and tablets, but Google’s ambitions run deeper. They’re pitching it as a platform that could run on all kinds of devices. To get developers on board with that plan, the company announced an update to the Android Accessory Development Kit (ADK) 2012 at Google I/O.
The ADK allows makers to quickly get up to speed on the platform’s function, but we were much more impressed with how great the form looked, especially when compared to the bare-bones 2011 edition. Has Google finally been bit by the design bug? We spoke with Android Communications’ Gina Scigliano to find out more.
The ADK 2012 comes out of the box as a working alarm clock and audio dock that’s compatible with your Android devices. Why an alarm clock? “Because it’s the last thing you see at night and the first thing you see in the morning!” says Scigliano. By making an object that fits into your life, Google hopes that you’ll be more likely to think about it when you’re deciding what to hack up next.
If you do decide to go deeper, Google has made that as easy as possible. The box is held together by magnets — there’s not a screw in sight. Squeeze it in the right place, and it pops open, revealing an Arduino-compatible board attached to an army of sensors.
The board can be detached if you want but with the included abilities to measure light, color, proximity, temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, acceleration, and the local magnetic field, to say nothing of the capacitive buttons, an SD card reader, USB, Bluetooth, LEDs and a speaker, there’s plenty to do using the kit.
“We ended up putting in a bunch of sensors without really knowing what we would use them for,” says Scigliano, “hopefully [they] will inspire people to make all kinds of interesting accessories, especially ones that nobody has made before.”
The kit you see here is a limited edition reference design. Only people who made it to Google I/O will get the boxes, but the schematics are available online. “We want people to copy the ADK,” Scigliano says, “both direct copies and heavily modified derivatives.”
The point is to lure makers and designers into giving the platform a try, at all levels of skill. The kit is very user-friendly, even for beginners. It’s designed to be easy to set up and customize out of the box. Interested in going deeper? Google will share all the details, right down to the source code and hardware schematics.
To get hackers fired up, Scigliano offers some possible uses the kit: “a smarter homebrew robot, picosatellite, hotel room alarm, irrigation controller, motorized remote controlled drapes, smart thermostat, egg timer with atmospheric pressure compensation, talking clock, data logging weather station, and did I mention robots? It’ll be really fun to see what people build.”
