I am Ashley Elsdon

someone who's doing some things

Tag: Android

Google’s mobile operating system and the stuff I do or try to do with it. A lot of the time it’ll be either music or automation related.

New toy, new danger

Posted by on in Tech

I’ve always liked the idea of a PDA type watch. So much so that I actually bought one of the old Fossil PDA Palm OS watches years ago. It was something that I almost instantly regretted as wearing it was more like having a small brick on my arm.

So after that somewhat failed experiment I decided that I wouldn’t try wrist based devices anymore. That was until I saw this one, which is very small. I thought I’d take a picture of it to compare against one of the newer iPod Nanos. As you can see it is tiny.

It’s a Sony Ericsson Live View, which is supposed to connect to your Android phone/device and be able to communicate with it to show texts, twitter etc as it happens on the phone without having to constantly check your phone. Interesting idea, and as I was able to get hold of one very cheaply I thought I’d give it a go.

So far I’ve only just got it out of the box, but hopefully I’ll have it up and running soon and I’ll post some results.

Mac OS 7 on Android

Posted by on in Mobile Applications

I finally found the files I needed to get this emulator running on my somewhat underpowered Android phone. Guess what, it works really well. So far I’ve only managed to get a few things working, but so far so good. It may even be useful, especially as I have a hypercard player app too.

Arduino Mega ADK

Posted by on in Making things, Tech

I sat on the fence about getting one of these for a while, but I eventually decided that I’d love to play with Arduino and Android and Processing all together. So expect some more semi-mobile geekery in due course.

Getting going with uLoops, or PocketBand …

Posted by on in Creative Process, Mobile Applications, Music

This is another of those ‘I’ve been meaning to do this for ages …’ type projects. Although not really a project. uLoops, or PocketBand as it seems to be called now is one of a very few Android apps that will a) run on my machine, and b) seems to work.

For a long time I’ve meant to move beyond the basic free version of the app and get the full version, and as it was on sale over the weekend I decided that now was a great time to do just that.

So I hope to get playing with it soon and even make something worthwhile. Who knows, I might even try and get it running on the Android install on my 3G!

Playing with Android Inventor: A very simple drum pad

Posted by on in Making things

I mentioned before that I’ve been playing with Android inventor now that it’s on MIT’s servers. The first thing I tried to do with it was to make something vaguely musical. Well, ok, not that musical to be honest. I thought I’d try and do something like a little drum pad to start with.

It works, sort of, but it really isn’t too useful sadly, as the drum sound only triggers when you take your finger off the button and not when you press it. So I really need a new way of getting that to work.

Arduino experiments restart

Posted by on in Making things, TechLeave a comment

Finally I got back to my Arduino this weekend. It took a while to get it going again, but finally it is. My real aim is to get Android and Arduino working together and I’d found a site that explains how to do it. However, once I was quite a way through I realised that it required an Arduino Mega ADK and not the older model I had.

So now I’m wondering about getting an ADK model for £60 to continue this project. Perhaps a more sensible thing would be to get some stuff done with what I’ve got first and see where I get to with that before moving on.

Not sure.

When did Processing get updated?

Posted by on in Tech

I only just realised! The new version seems to have a lot more, although not the ‘export signed package’ functionality as yet. Even so, It’s a big step, so that’s something else to spend some time with at the weekend. I might even get another sketch out.

My guest post at Music 4.5

Posted by on in Events, Mobile Applications, Music

The people over at Music 4.5 are lovely. When I first spoke to Rassami about a mobile music conference last year I was just amazed to think that someone would be interested in that kind of thing, but now, less that twelve months on, it doesn’t seem so strange.

I’m looking forward to the event on the 8th. The panel of speakers looks really good (yep, I’m on it too), and I think there’ll be a broad spectrum of issues raised to cover the mobile music world and where it has got to.

If you’re interested in reading my piece over at Music 4.5’s blog, you can find it here.