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 learned how PWM works and how it encodes information in both the frequency and the duty cycle. We have seen how the frequency is key to working with a passive buzzer and learned to manipulate it directly. We also learned how servos use PWM in a special way and how to modify the configuration to match the specs of a target servo. Finally, we have learned how to use PWM as analog output with a simple circuit.

So far we have used single direction protocols. Let's step up a level and start working with bidirectional communication with I2C, which also supports multiple devices on the same bus. This will be the focus of the next chapter.