My nephew is interested in learning programming and robotics.
Is it possible to program and control an Arduino completely with an Android phone? No PC or laptop to do the programming on, etc. Just the phone with it's USB port, bluetooth, and WiFi capabilites.
Thanks
Is it possible to program...
I don't think so... It's all open source, so it probably could be done, but the existing IDE runs on Windows, MAC, and Linux.
I've never written a phone app, but as far as I know phone apps aren't written on phones!
Personally, I wouldn't want to write code on a phone... A big screen (so you can see many lines of code at once) is nice, and a real keyboard is nice because if you make any typing errors, you are going to get errors.
...and control an Arduino completely with an Android phone?
Probably... Once the Arduino is programmed, you can "communicate" with it over USB, and with the proper shield (add-on board) you can communicate via Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, etc.
My nephew is interested in learning programming...
In some ways, the Arduino is a great introduction to programming. The basic C language library is fairly simple and it doesn't take a lot of code or "overhead" to do things like blink or dim LEDs, read voltages, control relays, etc.
You can probably read-through the entire [u]Programming Language Reference[/u] in less than an hour (although if you are new to programming you won't understand that much of it). Compared to the full C++ language, it's pretty simple.
I've used several different IDEs/compilers over the years, and I usually happy if I can get one installed, configured, and compiling "Hello World" the 1st day. It took me about 15 minutes between the time I started downloading the Arduino IDE and I had compiled and was running the "Blink LED" example. Very slick and easy!!!
On the other hand, to do much useful you need to add some hardware and that usually means learning electronics at the same time!
OK. Thanks. We'll look elsewhere. At this point I'm not sure he really knows what he wants to do so it might be easy to guide him to something he can do.
There is an app in the Android store called ArduinoDroid, it is basically an Arduino IDE. You can write sketches, import and export libraries and even compile and upload to a few arduino boards. I have it for my tablet, and I have been able to write some sketches on it, but it is also kinda slow, and no Serial monitor.
Im sure there are other apps that can actually control an arduino board using a specific sketch, but other then that, I dont know what else is out there.
Hope this helps.