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)

Extension components

In this section we will talk about some components that extend the functionalities of our developer kits, allowing us to do more and overcoming some of the deficits with Arduino, such as the lack of analog inputs and the very limited amount of PWM pins.

Analog to digital converter (ADC) – PCF8591

There are many sensors that just provide an analog value: moisture, smoke, raindrop, light, temperature, and so on, and as we mentioned several times, the Android Things developer kits do not have any analog inputs. To be able to use these sensors as input, we need a special component called an Analog to Digital Converter (ADC).

An ADC reads an analog value and converts it to a digital value. The resolution...