Those clever people behind the Arduino have opened the door on their latest venture Arduino Labs .
The purpose of the Lab is to allow the open Source community to contribute to the development of new products and tools. It will be the birthplace for their new developments both software and hardware.
Currently in the incubator at the Labs are the Mega ADK and Arduino GPRS/GSM Shield
The Mega ADK is Android’s Accessory Development Kit and the Arduino Mega ADK, which was designed to work with the Android OS.
The Mega ADK is a derivative of the Arduino Mega 2560 and includes a USB host chip not found on the 'standard' Mega 2560. This host chip allows any USB device to connect to the Arduino. In addition to the ADK there is a special version of the Processing IDE ( Processing 1.0 Beta ) that simplifies the programming task.
The other new arrival is the Arduino GPRS/GSM Shield.
This shield was designed to work with the Arduino Uno and Arduino Mega boards and will provide a voice , SMS and data connection to and from an Arduino opening up a whole world of possibilities for your latest project.
The Labs provide a resource for the projects with links to documentation and software repositories and it is intended to grow with the support of the community, this is a page to bookmark and visit regularly Arduino Labs
I hope you found this blog informative & useful , I welcome your comments either below or via twitter @peterjfrancis
ajawamnet
Cool... tho we've been using the AVR AT90usb1287 for a while now.
We did a design for a major medical device co. for bridging the patient barrier. The one side is a 1287 as a B mode device, powered by the USB host PC. Thru the 8mm patient barrier we pass both data and power to another 1287 that serves as a host A controller as well as a RS232 translator. The trick was getting it thru the EMI lab at the medical device company.