Many IOIO board owners are excited about today's official release of bluetooth dongle support. As its creator Ytai told us, with a firmware upgrade on the IOIO, it now supports connecting a standard Bluetooth dongle into its USB jack and is able to establish its connection to the Android phone wirelessly. This actually makes IOIO one of the cheapest, simplest and most powerful Bluetooth-enabled prototyping platforms out there. And some more good news: your application code stays exactly the same. End-users should care about what they want to do with their hardware for their project, not about how the heck (or how the hack) to communicate with it. So you only need to write the application-specific code (the
source code for the application takes less than 30 lines of Java for the IOIO-related stuff), and it seamlessly works on any kind of connection and can even switch from one to another while running. The closest one probably being Amarino. Keep in mind that IOIO is also capable of USB connectivity to Android of course (ADB or OpenAccessory), giving superior reliability latency and bandwidth compared to Bluetooth. You do the comparison.
Links to get started:
More information (and the instructional video) can be found
here.
IOIO can be purchased from SparkFun (about $50)
here.
The cheapest ($1.80 incl. shipping) Bluetooth dongle found and tested is
here.
Questions are happily answered on
the ioio-users discussion group.
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