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)

Summary

In this chapter we have covered the I2C protocol, which allows us to communicate with more complex peripherals. We have looked at the pin structure and how it works internally to address multiple components into the same bus.

Then we looked at the components of the Rainbow HAT that use I2C (alphanumeric display and temperature sensor) to realize that the meta driver layer is really thin. It is just hiding one parameter and the constructor. The complexity of handling these type of circuits is all about learning how each driver works.

We also looked at a few expansion boards: Analog to Digital Converter (ADC), PWM, and GPIO expanders. With all those, we can overcome the lack of analog inputs and outputs of the developer kits of Android Things.

Finally, we checked other type of sensors, including magnetometers, accelerometers, and gyroscopes, which are common in phones nowadays...