Google Embraces Open Hardware

Google announced in the yearly Google IO event the release of the Android Open Accessory Kit. This kit consists basically of an Arduino Mega combined with the USB host shield and some customized firmware. What this allows us to do is to create Android applications that will interact with an Arduino and thus with the external world. Since this is open source software and hardware, everybody can start developing around this concept right away. This is a great opportunity to give robots a good powerful Android-based brain in a simple way. Of course, that was possible in the past but it just got much simpler. We are eager to see what the community comes up with in the future. You can see the entire Keynote below but they only Start to talk about Arduino at minute 36. Via Google IO and Make.