Chapter 1. Setting Up Your Workspace

The first chapter of this book will teach you the basics of the Arduino and Android development so that you can be sure you have the basics required for the more advanced tutorials you will find in the rest of this book.

On the Arduino side, we will build a very simple project with a relay module (which is basically a switch that can be controlled with Arduino) and a temperature and humidity sensor. We will also see the basics of the Arduino IDE and the basic commands of the aREST library, which is a framework to easily control Arduino boards. We will use this library in several chapters of this book to make it really easy to control the Arduino board from an Android device. In this first chapter, we will simply try out the commands of the aREST library by having the Arduino board connected to your computer via a USB.

From the Android development point of view, we will work together to set up a development environment and ensure that your computer and the Android device are ready for development purposes. We will start off with a simple Android app that displays the legendary text, Hello World.

Android Studio is an IntelliJ-based Integrated Development Environment (IDE) fully supported by the Android development team, which will provide you with the necessary tools and resources to make sure that you develop a functional and aesthetic Android app.

Android Studio is in beta but the software is updated on a frequent and regular basis by a dedicated team at Google, which makes it the natural choice to develop our Android projects.