Uncle Andrew.. how come we have a $2 multi MHz board?…

A little bit of ARM history, and a small insight in to the various flavours of ARM processors, Thumb instructions and all the other quirks of the beast.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhwwrSaHdh8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=re5xAqgKqc0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VYxIaw1kBU

the story goes long ago when the first gsm mobile phone start flying off the shelves nokia , erisson become the global phone companies and the chip happens to be https://wikivisually.com/wiki/ARM7TDMI
today a similarly improved version becomes stm32 and runs the blue pill & maple mini

I remember Acorn and their BBC computer.

i used to think can’t the nokia phone (with arm7tdmi) do anything else? today that ‘wish’ comes true with the advent of arduino and stm32duino, and the huge breakouts market that little stm32 and other mcus really do ‘everything else’

a mouse optical sensor used to be just that a mouse, but today it detect counterfeit euros
http://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/9/9/7083/pdf

The opposite of that question would have been a lot more interesting:

Can today’s smartphones be made to do something else? Like reading the input from an opamp, or lighting up a led string, …

[dannyf – Mon Nov 13, 2017 9:05 pm] –
The opposite of that question would have been a lot more interesting:

Can today’s smartphones be made to do something else? Like reading the input from an opamp, or lighting up a led string, …

Unfortunately a few people (me included) and I think Ray, have tried to re-purpose old android phones or cheap tablets, but without any luck

Can today’s smartphones be made to do something else?
You may try with SMTH Challenge..

Sometimes I used some old smartphones as a timelapse cameras (using 24/7 Timelapse app) and ip cameras.

There are some educational post about using old smartphones as datalogger for physics acceleration experiments.

.. and of course old (ARM based) Android phones can be used as crude oscilloscopes, and fancy calculators.. and controllers for ESP wifi enabled gadgets, and as signal generators, and musical instrument tuners, and metronomes… and… GPS loggers .. and remote voice bugs…

[RogerClark – Mon Nov 13, 2017 10:07 pm] –

[dannyf – Mon Nov 13, 2017 9:05 pm] –
The opposite of that question would have been a lot more interesting:

Can today’s smartphones be made to do something else? Like reading the input from an opamp, or lighting up a led string, …

Unfortunately a few people (me included) and I think Ray, have tried to re-purpose old android phones or cheap tablets, but without any luck

Definitely correct a couple of years back, but today I find that my Samsung phone with bluetooth and WiFi is a near ideal terminal: SSH into my ESP32, my RPi and even use VNC to get a nice remote GUI. Others have reported decent results with the MIT Android app development tool to create custom apps to interact with their IoT.

Nothing stays the same … we must periodically go back and revisit past failures in light of new tools.

Ray

If the Android phone can be rooted (this is becoming more difficult) the “Linux Deploy” app will give one a chroot Linux install. I used one phone as a micro file server as one might use a RaspberryPi, except mine had a built in UPS and an integral user interface via an Android VNC client. It also served a home temperature monitor (with logging) to the web all written in standard Python and using the phone’s battery temperature sensor as the measuring device.

More recently I wrote an Android app using the MIT AppInventor that is a terminal to a bluetooth connected microcontroller running a Forth environment (eForth on an STM8 or Mecrisp-Stellaris on an STM32). In essence it gives me an interactive and remotely programmable microcontroller. There are similar apps available on the Android App Store, but I didn’t find one that would send a file to device.

Like zoomx, I’ve used old Android phones as time-lapse cameras or as remote monitoring cameras. Their shortcoming is lousy performance under low light conditions, so they’re not much good as security cameras. Note that my substantial collection of Android phones is mostly low end devices from pay-as-you-go providers in “loss-leader” deals.

[dannyf – Mon Nov 13, 2017 9:05 pm] –
The opposite of that question would have been a lot more interesting:

Can today’s smartphones be made to do something else? Like reading the input from an opamp, or lighting up a led string, …

oh well if u don’t mind paring it with a blue pill or maple mini or perhaps any stm32duino capable boards
https://felhr85.net/2014/11/11/usbseria … roid-v2-0/
https://github.com/felHR85/UsbSerial
https://github.com/mik3y/usb-serial-for-android

u could borrow the power of the stm32 ‘swiss army’ all purpose device (development boards) to do the job, maybe even running as your 3d printer

If the Android phone can be rooted (this is becoming more difficult)

Older Samsung devices are perfect for re-purposing, and a lot of them are relatively easy to root. If you are up for a little bit of surgery, you can pick them up with a broken screen for pocket money prices. The replacement screens are very cheap, and fitting them is relatively easy if you are careful and do you Youtube research. The easiest ones only need a hot air gun a spudger and a couple of screwdrivers to fix them.

Even something as ancient as a Samsung Ace 2 or a Galaxy II makes a pretty useful platform for controlling and hacking other stuff.

The game of cat and mouse between hardware vendors and hackers trying to root their toys is interesting to watch.

Once rooted, the alternative ROMs allow you much more scope for hacking than the stock manufacturer or phone company offerings.

i’ve been wanting to install a custom rom on my phone so that those pesky apps won’t complain that the phone is rooted. A truly custom rom probably doesn’t need root, as everything can be root if u want it to be

[ag123 – Tue Nov 14, 2017 5:25 pm] –
i’ve been wanting to install a custom rom on my phone so that those pesky apps won’t complain that the phone is rooted. A truly custom rom probably doesn’t need root, as everything can be root if u want it to be

What make/model of phone?

@ag123

Take a look at lineageos to see if your phone is supported..

In fact, I now will only buy phones which I can load Lineage or another custom ROM

XDA is also another good place for custom ROMs, e.g. I have a Samsung J5 phone which is not supported by Lineage but someone made a partially working ROM and posted on XDA. ( but some things dont work, like bluetooth audio)

I even recompiled the LimeageOS ROM for my phone, but I had to setuo a linux machine specifically for the purpose and it took about 10 hours to run the whole makefile !

However, as far as I know, these custom ROMs are just designed to be replacement versions of Android, and you dont end up with a linux box rather than a phone.

Phones and tablets don’t often have any GPIO or other hardware peripherals e.g. Serial, or SPI or I2C.
So they dont seem to be able to fit the niche of a RPi + screen

If the chipset supports USB host mode (and this is also supported by the Custom ROM), you can add USB serial peripherals, SPI bridging and some gpio (by bitbanging the handshaking pins). Other hardware (keyboards, mice, HID devices etc) are also available using host mode. Having said that, you can also use WiFi to control things like ESP32/ESP8266 modules and use those to bridge to GPIO.

The Pi + screen on the other hand is a “real” linux box and is in many ways much more flexible (but you do need to provide your own battery solution for truly portable scenarios).

I had a go at using USB to serial on an Android device some time ago.

I think it had some drivers installed, but only for specific USB VID/PID numbers and I cant remember if it was for the generic USB CDC ACM that we use

I think it was 3 or 4 years ago and I was trying to use an Arduino Pro Micro, and managed to get it to work, but I recall it not just working “out of the box”

Possibly the easiest thing to do is change the VID/PID that the Core presents

BTW.
I’ve always wondered if Windows etc has a VID / PID registered by default for USB CDCACM (and possibly for DFU), which could be used to save loading drivers
i.e as the drivers are pre-installed and our “installer” just does the association of VID/PID to existing driver

[RogerClark – Tue Nov 14, 2017 11:56 pm] –
BTW.
I’ve always wondered if Windows etc has a VID / PID registered by default for USB CDCACM (and possibly for DFU), which could be used to save loading drivers
i.e as the drivers are pre-installed and our “installer” just does the association of VID/PID to existing driver

Maybe this program can be useful
http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/usb_devices_view.html
but it seems that only shows devices that was connected.

Remember
Starting from version 1.35, you can view the vendor name and product name of your USB devices. In order to use this feature, you have to download the USB ID’s list of Stephen J. Gowdy (http://www.linux-usb.org/usb.ids) and put the file in the same folder of USBDeview.exe
The name of the file must remain as ‘usb.ids’.

@zoomx

Thanks. I’ve used that before.. It is useful for debugging USB problems

Uh, I forgot this
USB device class drivers included in Windows
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/librar … s.85).aspx

[zoomx – Wed Nov 15, 2017 9:28 am] –
Uh, I forgot this
USB device class drivers included in Windows
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/librar … s.85).aspx

Thanks

[ahull – Tue Nov 14, 2017 6:48 pm] –
What make/model of phone?

oh well, over the years i’ve accumulated a few
including a sam s4, sam s7 and more recently an asus zenfone 3, my sam s7 died just shortly after warranty expires, luckily they didn’t go up in flames just like those sam note 7 later i bought an asus zenfone 3 deluxe instead as a replacement

@roger
yup LineageOS as i’ve heard is a good development though i’ve yet to try it out, it’s a great thing that volunteers have put together what is remnants of CyanogenMod and rebuild that into LineageOS

i think the android releases >=4 has OTG host support (dependent on hardware)
https://developer.android.com/guide/top … index.html
and it seemed there are several usb-serial implementations out there on github
https://felhr85.net/2014/11/11/usbseria … roid-v2-0/
https://github.com/felHR85/UsbSerial
https://github.com/mik3y/usb-serial-for-android

i’ve yet to try them out too but i’d think it is possibly a more (most?) convenient way if one is looking for a way to interface android to BP/MM and other stm32 etc boards, the usb ‘extension’ effectively allows a BP/MM to work as an ‘IO expander’ providing access to pins / gpios, comm (uart/i2c/spi) etc providing a way out against ‘non-expandable’ smartphones

of course these days there is Bluetooth LE, but then that’d need the help of an extra breakout board e.g. nrf51822 or cc2540/2541 etc
the low cost stm32 BP/MM possibly still lose out to the wireless alternatives in that sense, but the built-in usb support is nevertheless one of the most valuable asset of stm32f103 etc arduino boards

@ag123

Yes. USB to GPIO etc would be handy.

Re:BLE

I have done a lot with Bluetooth, but I find on both Android and iOS, that getting thngs to work on different Android devices is problematic.
The same applies to different versions of Android and also to a lesser extent iOS.

I am not sure if USB would be any different, but its definietly worth investigating