Chapter 2. Interfacing with Android

In the last chapter, you installed Android on your BBB. You also gathered all of the hardware and components that you will need to try out the exercises in this book. Now that you have a working Android system and the hardware needed to explore it, it is time to dive into Android and find out how to prepare it to interface with custom hardware.

Most people would not consider Android and Linux to be very similar, but the two have more in common than you might realize. Underneath the polished UIs and a wide variety of apps, Android is secretly Linux. Android's filesystem layout and services are quite different from those of a typical Linux system, so there are certainly many differences between the two in terms of user space (where apps and other processes execute). In terms of kernel space (where device drivers execute and resources are allocated to each running process), they are almost identical in functionality. Understanding how the BBB...