IOIO

For Christmas I got a IOIOMint. That’s a cool little bridge device which lets you connect external hardware to an Android device.

I got some time to play with it tonight, so I went looking for a simple project to try it out with. I found this nice tutorial on using it to connect to a Wii nunchuck. The result looks like this:

The Galaxy Nexus at the bottom is running Dan’s app. It’s talking to the IOIOMint over bluetooth. Those four wires go from the IOIO’s I2C pins to the nunchuck’s cable using a Nunchucky adapter.

When I move the joystick on the nunchuck, the ball moves around on the screen. Getting everything set up was really simple. The only two problems I ran into were forgetting to plug in the battery (Doh!!) and setting the Android project up for API 17. The IOIOLib was written for a version before USB support moved into the android.hardware package. I simply switched the project back to API 10 and everything started working fine.

This looks like it’s going to be a really fun, easy to use toy. Let’s see; what should we build first?