Arduino ADK release
It looks just like any other Aduino board , but in fact it is more. It is special, it is branded and endorsed by Google
The Ardui
no ADK is a microcontroller board based on the ATmega2560. It has a USB host interface to connect with Android based phones, based on the MAX3421e IC. It has 54 digital input/output pins (of which 14 can be used as PWM outputs), 16 analog inputs, 4 UARTs (hardware serial ports), a 16 MHz crystal oscillator, a USB connection, a power jack, an ICSP header, and a reset button.
The ADK is based on the Mega 2560.
Similar to the Mega 2560 and Uno, it features an Atmega8U2 programmed as a USB-to-serial converter.
For information on using the board with the Android OS, see Google's ADK documentation.
What's under the hood
| Microcontroller | ATmega2560 |
| Operating Voltage | 5V |
| Input Voltage (recommended) | 7-12V |
| Input Voltage (limits) | 5.5-16V |
| Digital I/O Pins | 54 (of which 14 provide PWM output) |
| Analog Input Pins | 16 |
| DC Current per I/O Pin | 40 mA |
| DC Current for 3.3V Pin | 50 mA |
| Flash Memory | 256 KB of which 8 KB used by bootloader |
| SRAM | 8 KB |
| EEPROM | 4 KB |
| Clock Speed | 16 MHz |
Communication
The Arduino ADK has a number of facilities for communicating with a computer, another Arduino, or other microcontrollers. The ATmega2560 provides four hardware UARTs for TTL (5V) serial communication. An ATmega8U2 on the board channels one of these over USB and provides a virtual com port to software on the computer (Windows machines will need a .inf file, but OSX and Linux machines will recognize the board as a COM port automatically. The Arduino software includes a serial monitor which allows simple textual data to be sent to and from the board. The RX and TX LEDs on the board will flash when data is being transmitted via the ATmega8U2 chip and USB connection to the computer (but not for serial communication on pins 0 and 1).
A SoftwareSerial library allows for serial communication on any of the ADK's digital pins.
The ATmega2560 also supports TWI and SPI communication. The Arduino software includes a Wire library to simplify use of the TWI bus; see the Wire library for details. For SPI communication, use the SPI library.
The USB host interface given by MAX3421E IC allows the ADK Arduino to connect and interact to any type of device that have a USB port. For example, allows you to interact with many types of phones, controlling Canon cameras, interfacing with keyboard, mouse and games controllers as Wiimote and PS3.
For more information vist the ADK's official page at : http://arduino.cc/en/Main/ArduinoBoardADK
