>> 1SHEELD - USE YOUR EXISTING PHONE AS AN ARDUINO SHIELD

Tinkering with your arduino embedded controller and not sure which shields to buy?

1Sheeld is an arduino shield that lets you use your android smartphone and its capabilities (LCD, touchscreen, sensors, network) in your arduino projects and avoid actually having to buy individual arduino shields - allowing tinkers and hobbyists to quickly get up and running without considerable financial investment upfront.

After a successful kickstarter campaign - the devices are already shipping and available.

They offer a number of different virtual shields including social network integration (facebook, twitter and foursquare) and basic communication methods (email and sms) that opens up a lot of possibilities. The communication between the shield and the android smartphone is over Bluetooth 2.1 and has a limited range of 10 metres - mainly due to cost considerations.

So how does it work exactly?

• 1Sheeld is running a custom version of Firmata protocol which allows our micro-controller to scan each pin of the Arduino really fast and send a report to our app when any pin changes its status. You can use this functionality out-of-the-box without the need for our library. There is another mode also which relies totally on the Serial peripheral of the Arduino (Pins 0,1), here our library comes in hand, we built a protocol above the Firmata protocol to send huge amount of data to a specific shield on our app, that allowed us to implement LCD, Twitter, Seven Segment ..etc. with only two pins from Arduino instead of taking a whole port.
  source: kickstarter campaign website

It will be interesting to see if it is possible to combine the 1sheeld with another shield like a Gameduino to make the android smartphone a remote game-pad controller to extend some of the earlier tinkering I did with arduino Frogger concept.

UPDATE
Here is an updated Controller class for use with the 1Sheeld - look at how simple that was.

• #include <OneSheeld.h>
  
  class Controller 
  {
    public:
      void begin() 
      {
        prev = 0;
  
        // initialize 1Sheeld
        OneSheeld.begin();
      }
      byte read() 
      {
        byte r = 0;
  
        // read the values from the 1Sheeld gamepad
        if (GamePad.isUpPressed())    r |= CONTROL_UP;
        if (GamePad.isDownPressed())  r |= CONTROL_DOWN;
        if (GamePad.isLeftPressed())  r |= CONTROL_LEFT;
        if (GamePad.isRightPressed()) r |= CONTROL_RIGHT;
  
        byte edge = r & ~prev;
        prev = r;
        return edge;
      }
    private:
      byte prev;
  }

They claim once prototyping is done you can use official shields with little code modification.