Automagic Forum

Every arduino in existence has a usb serial port. I can talk to an arduino from an android phone with an OTG cable and one of the numerous serial apps in play market. I believe at some point android baked in support for common usb serial chips, like the FTDI ft232rl.

how awesome would it be if automagic made it easy to interface with the physical world via serial? Other methods involve extra (expensive) hardware like Bluetooth or WiFi shields and are difficult to program both on the arduino side and android for a beginner.

At first, being able to send a serial string based on a trigger would be so cool. If possible it would be even better to have the serial as a trigger, to do certain things when it sees certain strings (a command parser of sorts)

Possible things that are EASY and cheap and awesome:

Turn on coffee machine from sms message

Water plants remotely, retrive sensor data via sms or email

Start my car via sms, since my remote start has aux triggers

The possibilities are endless!! With how many arduinos and old android phones there are in existence, this could blow up into something big. Nobody does this yet!

I've done a lot of research on this and know where to find info about serial support in android. I'm a competant microcontroller programmer and have EE skills to do fun stuff. My goal is to get on hackaday.com with something rad that nobody has done yet....

I forgot this app can do widgets! You could even build simple GUI's using widgets as buttons, and complex stuff with notifications and global vars!

Hvac control
Door opener

It's endless! All that's needed is to be able to send serial data.. seems trivial to me when I looked at it, but you have an awesome base to go off of. Prototyping would be easier, as it's cheaper and easier to use a phone and $2 otg cable than to wire switches and such..

Ugh.. I'm mobile. Didn't realize I put thread in wrong area :-/