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)

LEDs

If you are familiar with how Arduino code is structured, you may be expecting to have a setup and a loop methods. Android Things can work like that too. We will start with our methods named using that convention to provide a common ground if you have experience with Arduino. However, Android Things allows us to write code in a much more structured way. In this section we will start with something close to the Arduino way, explain its drawbacks, and show better alternatives, showing the different ways to blink an LED.

Blinking an LED is the IoT equivalent of Hello World.

Let's get into blinking an LED the Arduino way.

The Arduino way

The simplest way is to have a setup where we initialize the LED, followed by a loop...