I was enthused by Pieter Bok’s recent post involving an iPhone App connecting to an Arduino via WiFi:
I don’t have an iPhone, or a WiFi shield, but Bluetooth was mentioned in the thread, so I Googled around for Android, Arduino and Bluetooth, finding several links which made use of an amazing, FREE resource from MIT called App Inventor, for developing Android Apps:
http://appinventor.mit.edu/explore
This link is to version 2 of App inventor. Several of the Arduino related links, were for App Inventor version 1, which is still available, although not for long, so you are advised not to start using it.
App Inventor 2 is entirely web-based, and includes the ability to connect to your target Android device via Wifi and run an emulation of your App in real time - the display on your device changes as you change the design in App Inventor! If you don’t even have an Android device, you can run an emulator on your PC and App Inventor will connect to it.
App Inventor 2 has two screens - Design and Blocks. In Design, you drag and drop components such as buttons, labels, text boxes, sliders, etc, on to a representation of your Android device screen and arrange them as you want them to appear.
In the Blocks screen, you drag and drop representations of code segments which relate the display components together and ultimately generate your app. Once you get into it, it’s actually very straightforward.
I've posted my initial experiences of using App Inventor on my Blog:
I intend to post more, so if you are interested, please keep a look out.
Neil
