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)

Buttons

The next component we are going to work with are capacitive buttons. The Rainbow HAT has three of them, labeled A, B, and C. Buttons can be handled in two different ways, using Buttons and using InputDrivers.

While Buttons are similar in behavior to the ones we place on a traditional UI, InputDrivers are similar to HID keyboards; they allow us to integrate with the operating system and send key press events, letting us handle our button presses as standard keys.

We will look at both of them with the same example: we will turn the red LED on when button A is pressed and off when it is not.

Let's start with the button driver.

Button driver

The simplest way to interact with a button is to use the button driver. This...