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)

The Rainbow HAT

In this chapter, we will make use of the Rainbow HAT to learn how to interact with hardware. This HAT (Hardware on Top) is a selection of components that you can plug into a developer kit to start working with them without the need for any wiring. We will start with an overview of the architecture of Android Things—explaining peripheral lifecycle and user space drivers—and then work with each component of the Rainbow HAT (as shown in the following screenshot) including some best practices along the way.

The Rainbow HAT with all the LEDs and LCD on

For each part we will use a complete self-contained example and we will analyze how the code works. Along this chapter, we will be using the high-level abstraction drivers for the components that come from the contrib-drivers repository from Google.

We will also take advantage of the meta driver for the...