Book Image

Android Things Quick Start Guide

By : Raul Portales
5 (1)
Book Image

Android Things Quick Start Guide

5 (1)
By: Raul Portales

Overview of this book

Android Things is the IoT platform made by Google, based on Android. It allows us to build smart devices in a simple and convenient way, leveraging on the Android ecosystem tools and libraries, while letting Google take care of security updates. This book takes you through the basics of IoT and smart devices. It will help you to interact with common IoT device components and learn the underlying protocols. For a simple setup, we will be using Rainbow HAT so that we don't need to do any wiring. In the first chapter, you will learn about the Android Things platform, the design concepts behind it, and how it relates to other IoT frameworks. We will look at the Developer Kits and learn how to install Android Things on them by creating a simple project. Later, we will explore the real power of Android Things, learning how to make a UI, designing and communicating with companion apps in different ways, showcasing a few libraries. We will demonstrate libraries and you will see how powerful the Android Things operating system is.
Table of Contents (10 chapters)

Summary

In this first chapter we have learned about the big picture of Android Things, the vision behind the platform, and how it compares to other IoT platforms. We explored the different developer kits available so you can pick the one that suits you best and learned how to install Android Things on them and how to connect them to our development computer. Finally, we followed the creation of a basic project for Android Things with Android Studio, saw how it is structured, and looked at the differences with a default Android project.

Now that we have everything ready, it is time to start tinkering with the Rainbow HAT, which will be the focus of our next chapter.