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)

Android Things architecture

Before we get our hands on into the code, let's explore the overall architecture of Android Things and present a few concepts that we will be using throughout the chapter, such as the best practices to handle the peripheral lifecycle and the concept of user space drivers.

Peripheral lifecycle

Whenever we want to use a peripheral, we need to get access to it before we can do anything with it. This is done using the open method that all peripheral classes have. Opening a peripheral gives us exclusive control over it and therefore it can not be opened if it is already open by another app. The operating system will throw an Exception if the peripheral is already in use.

As you can imagine, this...