Book Image

Android Things Projects

By : Francesco Azzola
Book Image

Android Things Projects

By: Francesco Azzola

Overview of this book

Android Things makes developing connected embedded devices easy by providing the same Android development tools, best-in-class Android framework, and Google APIs that make developers successful on mobile. With this book, you will be able to take advantage of the new Android framework APIs to securely build projects using low-level components such as sensors, resistors, capacitors, and display controllers. This book will teach you all you need to know about working with Android Things through practical projects based on home automation, robotics, IoT, and so on. We’ll teach you to make the most of the Android Things and build enticing projects such as a smart greenhouse that controls the climate and environment automatically. You’ll also create an alarm system, integrate Android Things with IoT cloud platforms, and more. By the end of this book, you will know everything about Android Things, and you’ll have built some very cool projects using the latest technology that is driving the adoption of IoT. You will also have primed your mindset so that you can use your knowledge for profitable, practical projects.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Ambient light control system description


Before diving into the project implementation details, it is useful to have an overview of the project we want to build. The idea that stands behind this project is building a system that has a unique center of control, represented by Android Things, and several remote IoT boards that are connected to RGB LED strips. These IoT boards receive the commands from the Android Things app and according to these commands, they set various RGB LED color or apply several light effects.

This project uses two different IoT boards:

  • Android Things compatible boards such as Raspberry
  • PI 3 Arduino Uno R3

The following diagram gives an overview of this project and the roles played by these two boards:

As you can notice, the LED strips are connected to Arduino boards that manage them directly. In turn, the Arduino boards receive commands from the Android Things board using HTTP protocol. HTTP protocol is a web-oriented protocol that we can use to exchange data between different...