[JonSkeptic]

What will they think of next?

If only there was some way to take advantage of all those hardware capabilities on the phone without the hassle of hooking up an Arduino. If only there was some sort of way to write 'programs' that take advantage of that hardware. But 'programs' sounds boring, we'll call them 'applications'. Wait, no...that has too many letters. I know! We'll call them 'apps'! You're gonna love 'em, they're the next big thing.

[spion]

You're right. We don't need the Arduino, we can simply use our phone directly to control that RC car, open doors with passcodes and read the temperature of things.

Oh wait, a smartphone's hardware is closed, you get what you get (in terms of sensors and control) and thats it.

Hmm. It would be nice if we could extend the smartphone's hardware capabilities...

[zokier]

> Hmm. It would be nice if we could extend the smartphone's hardware capabilities...

on a more serious note, I'd love to see more widespread generic HW and SW agnostic GPIO/DAQ standard. HW agnostic meaning that you could make your own boards with whatever MCU you prefer, and interface it with whatever. SW agnostic so that it would work with Windows, Linux, Android, OSX, iOS etc painlessly.

[moron4hire]

I don't think there is any reason the current crop of consumer-grade MCUs couldn't do that. An adapter cable for the differing pin layouts (you're never going to get everyone to agree to the same footprint). On the PC side, they are almost all running the FTDI chip, with a driver that simulates the device as an RS232 serial port. So at that point it's really just making sure the data is standardized.

Hell, most of the devices have support for inter-platform RS232. You should be able to communicate between an Arduino and an MSP430 via RS232 (you might need some resistors in the middle, because I think one runs 1.7v hotter than the other).

The hardware situation is fragmented because I think people want the one-device-one-shield model. I don't think they want to deal with daughter boards dangling from adapter cables. The majority of users for these systems are either hardware novices or hardware-and-software novices. Most of the electrical engineers I know steer a wide birth away from them. And once they get invested in a platform like Arduino, jumping over to something like TI MSP430 is an effort that is at least as significant of an effort from where they started, while providing only a limited, non-obvious benefit (in that MSP430s are cheeeeaaaap).

[follower]

> I'd love to see more widespread generic HW and SW agnostic GPIO/DAQ standard.

Interestingly the linked project appears to be based on Firmata which has at least some of the agnosticism you seek.

[pmelendez]

There is a nice cynical mutual recursion around here :)

[maxerickson]

That's nicely cynical, but seems to overlook that this is a nice way to interface a cell phone with a hardware project.