A group of developers have come up with a USB flash drive-sized device that lets you connect your smartphone to a computer or other device and use it as wireless mouse, keyboard, game controller, or camera. It’s called the Babuino, and it also works the other way around — letting you use your computer’s keyboard to enter text on your phone, for instance.

The team is trying to raise $40,000 to mass produce the Babuino through an Indiegogo crowd-funding campaign.

If all goes according to plan, you can get a Babuino device for a pledge of $25 or more.

Babuino

That’s the early-bird special pricing. Once the first devices are claimed, the price goes up to $35.

Babunio features an Atmel ATXMEGA128A1 microcontroller, a USB port, and built-in Bluetooth and infrared. The board is Arduino-compatible, and there are two versions of Babuino: the Babuino Stick has a case and looks like a standard USB flash drive, and the Babuino Board is an uncovered board with exposed pins that let you connect it to external hardware.

While there are plenty of tools that let you use your phone as a remote control for a PC, Babuino’s a bit different since the developers say it doesn’t require any special drivers or other software to run on your computer.

Just plug the Babuino into your PC, fire up an app on your phone, and you can use it to control your devices.

You can read more about the project at the OpenJungle website.

 

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6 replies on “Babuino wants to turn your smartphone into a mouse, game controller etc for $25 and up”

  1. or i could just use a mouse, keyboard, or game controller connected to my computer

  2. For the apparent basic scenario (remote keyboard and mouse) i’m using “Android Desktop Remote” by David Straw which you can find at either https://androiddesktopremote.com or https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.strawbuilt.remotecontrol.client.free and that works without any kind of extra hardware since it just works over WiFi with any PC on my network.

    I can’t really see any practical usage scenarios where using it as a “game controller” for the lack of tactile feedback or camera would make a lot of sense, and for remote controlling my Android Phone from my PC there are things like VNC servers for Android, so i don’t really see how a hardware dongle plus companion app on the phone would give me any true advantage to a pure software solution.

  3. For using my Android phone as a mouse/keyboard for my PC, I use an applicaton called Unified Remote. No dongle required! It works great.

  4. Not seeing the point. One side is going to need a special app, why not both and just forget the hardware if the PC already has BT or buy a $10 BT blob to stick on a USB port.

    I can see a few specialized situations where you might carry this thing and your phone to plug into random machines to present with where you probably wouldn’t have permissions to install a driver.

    And there are already small AVR chips on sticks, some with real USB ports instead of bitbanging USB 1.0 on GPIO lines.

      1. You are right. I only looked at the part number here and it left off the all important U at the end of the part number. Also notice they are springing for an XMega instead of the more typical Mega128. So they are certainly providing value value for the money. An XMega, BT module and IR emitter/receiver on a protoboard for $35 isn’t exactly a bad deal.

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