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)

Revisiting Rainbow HAT components

Following the same approach as for GPIO and PWM, we are going to start by removing the Rainbow HAT meta driver from our dependencies and using the specific drivers of the components directly. This time the components are the alphanumeric display and the temperature and pressure sensor.

Alphanumeric display (Ht16k33)

The driver for the alphanumeric display is called driver-ht16k33, so we just need to add it to our build.gradle:

dependencies {
[...]
implementation 'com.google.android.things.contrib:driver-ht16k33:+'
}

The only difference with the code we used before is that we now have to construct an object of type AlphanumericDisplay passing the I2C bus name, which we can initialize...