The Whizzo Blog

SIO2Arduino

03 January 2012

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Posted by Dan

I spent the long holiday weekend on a fun little project I've unimaginatively dubbed SIO2Arduino. Yes, I'm a geek :-)

in Miscellaneous

BlueSMiRF Silver Bluetooth modem and Mac OS X

09 December 2011

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Posted by Dan

For creating a prototype for a wireless Servus PagerLink device, I decided to use an Arduino Uno and Sparkfun's BlueSMiRF Silver bluetooth modem. The process of setting...

in Servus, Miscellaneous

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Tablets and the Android Open Accessory Development Kit (ADK)

19 August 2011

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Posted by Dan

Our newest product, Servus, has a requirement to control hardware pager systems via RS-232. Since Servus is Android tablet-based, it made perfect sense to use the recently introduced Android Open Accessory Development Kit (ADK) to implement this...

in Android

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Android 3.2 bugginess and update woes

31 July 2011

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Posted by Dan

ASUS pushed out the Android 3.2 update to its Eee Pad Transformer devices a few days ago. This has caused the expected problems for my application, most of which were easily resolved.

However, my testing has revealed what appears to be a significant bug in Android 3.2 itself. This bug prevents the default application selection dialog from...

in Android

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Servus restaurant guest management system now available

20 July 2011

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Posted by Dan

After many months of development and exhaustive user testing, our new restaurant guest management system for Android Honeycomb tablet devices, Servus, is available. It is intuitive, powerful and can accommodate both large and small establishments. More details are available at our sister site...

in Servus, Android, Whizzo News

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Arduino arrives!

12 July 2011

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Posted by Dan

I just purchased an Arduino Uno which will be used to prototype one of our next projects. It will involve controlling an RS-232 hardware device via Android's bluetooth. It should prove to be a fun endeavor!

in Android, Servus

Free Android apps outnumber free iOS apps

30 April 2011

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Posted by Dan

According to Distimo, the number of free Android apps outnumber free iOS apps 134,342 to 121,845. However, I think that statistic is misleading.

A quick search of the term "hello world" on the iOS App Store returns 4 free results, most of which seem to have a useful purpose. A similar...

in Android, Miscellaneous

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Honeycomb and the case of the missing Android tablet apps

31 March 2011

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Posted by Dan

This article on Ars Technica ponders the mystery of why there are so few Honeycomb-specific applications on Google's marketplace. They are comparing the situation with the iPad which had almost 1000 apps on launch day. I can...

in Android

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Mayan Madness for Android now available

22 March 2011

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Posted by Dan

Amazon has finally released their Appstore and with it comes Mayan Madness for Android. It was submitted back in mid-December so it trails behind it's iOS counterpart which made the jump to 2.0 about a month ago. I'm hoping Android sales will...

in Mayan Madness

Android, JmDNS and Wifi multicast packets

01 March 2011

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Posted by Dan

For the current project I'm working on, I chose to use the excellent JmDNS library to facilitate Android device service discovery on the local Wifi network. Just be sure to use version 3.4.0 or greater since it fixes some issues with using JDK methods that don't exist on Android (e.g....

in Programming, Android

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