Robot hackathon connects with Android, browsers and the cloud

Posted by Ryan Hickman and Mamie Rheingold, 20% Robotics Task Force

With a beer fridge stocked and music blasting, engineers from across Google—and the world—spent the month of October soldering and hacking in their 20% time to connect hobbyist and educational robots with Android phones. Just two months later we’re psyched to announce three ways you can play with your iRobot Create(R), LEGO(R) MINDSTORMS(R) or VEX Pro(R) through the cloud:

• App Inventor for Android
• Cellbots for Android
• Python library for the Scripting Layer 4 Android

For the month of October, we invited any Googler who wanted to contribute to connect robots to Google’s services in the cloud to pool their 20% time and participate in as much of the process as they could, from design to hard-core coding.

Thanks to our hardware partners (iRobot, LEGO Group, and VEX Robotics), we never suffered a shortage of supplies. Designers flew in from London, and prototypes were passed between engineers in Tel-Aviv, Hyderabad, Zurich, Munich and California. In Mountain View, we gathered around every Thursday night, rigging up a projector against the wall to share our week’s worth of demos while chowing on pizza. And here is what we produced (so far!):

• App Inventor: Low level Bluetooth support for connecting with many serial-enabled robots, and of course tight integration with LEGO MINDSTORMS.
• Cellbots for Android: Brand new Java app from Cellbots.com, which is open source and available for free in the Android Market.
• Python library: Modularized version of the popular Cellbots project, which is all open source code.

We hope these applications provide some fun and inspire you to build upon this lightweight connectivity between robots, Android, the cloud and your browser.

Letting everyone do great things with App Inventor

Posted by Karen Parker, App Inventor Program Manager

In July, we announced App Inventor for Android, a Google Labs experiment that makes it easier for people to access the capabilities of their Android phone and create apps for their personal use. We were delighted (and honestly a bit overwhelmed!) by the interest that our announcement generated. We were even more delighted to hear the stories of what you were doing with App Inventor. All sorts of people (teachers and students, parents and kids, programming hobbyists and programming newbies) were building Android apps that perfectly fit their needs.

For example, we’ve heard of people building vocabulary apps for their children, SMS broadcasting apps for their community events, apps that track their favorite public transportation routes and—our favorite—a marriage proposal app.

We are so impressed with the great things people have done with App Inventor, we want to allow more people the opportunity to do great things. So we’re excited to announce that App Inventor (beta) is now available in Labs to anyone with a Google account.

Visit the App Inventor home page to get set up and start building your first app. And be sure to share your App Inventor story on the App Inventor user forum. Maybe this holiday season you can make a new kind of homemade gift—an app perfectly designed for the recipient’s needs!