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)

Introducing Android Things

Welcome to Android Things Quick Start Guide. In this introductory chapter, we will look at the big picture of Android Thing, how it compares to other—in principle—similar platforms, such as Arduino, and explore the vision behind the platform. We will check the different developer kits available exploring the pros and cons of each one. We will also look at the other components we will use throughout the book. We will also learn how to install Android Things on a developer kit and how to connect to it from our development computer in order to deploy our code. Finally, we will follow the creation of a basic project for Android Things using Android Studio, see how it is structured, and discuss the differences with a default Android project. The topics covered are as follows:

  • What is Android Things?
  • Design concepts behind Android Things
  • Hardware you will need
  • Setting up a developer kit
  • Creating an Android Things project

So, let's get started.