Amarino aims to facilitate the development of tangible interfaces
to smart phones by eliminating several of the developments steps
that are required to build them. In particular, Amarino allows
Android-based mobile phones to communicate seamlessly with
Arduino-based microcontrollers. It also allows tangible
developers who would like to employ phone-based sensing in
their projects to do so without engaging in any mobile device
programming. The toolkit consists of two components, an
Android [3] application, which runs on a mobile device, and a
software library for the Arduino [5], which runs on a tangible
device. Central to each of these is a communication protocol that
allows a developer to focus on the behavior of his or her project
instead of low level communication details. The current
implementation takes advantage of most phones’ built in
Bluetooth radios and assumes that communication takes place
over Bluetooth.