My first objective was to have the neopixels display the time sent by my phone. To do this, I used the skeleton plugin project and Android calendar class to send h:m:s values to the Amarino app, which forwarded them to the arduino. Initially I only had the plugin send h:m values in 1 minute intervals, but found that the plugin would stop running. To solve this and increase the accuracy of the time from +/- 1 min to +/- 1s the time is now sent every second. Whether this has an impact on battery life is yet to be seen.

Sending phone notifications was more challenging to set up. I figured tasker can do a good job of reacting to phone notifications, and it's much easier to edit notification actions than if it were coded in an app. The best way of implementing tasker into Amarino would have been by creating a tasker plugin, but my java skills are nearly non-existent. Instead, I am using tasker to broadcast intents over shell script. Figuring out how to do this and include the 'extras' needed for amarino to process the intents took forever, and involved a lot of trial and error. If anyone's interested I can make a 'how-to' including the script tasker needs.