We have delivered two seminars about Android during the last quarter of 2012. The seminars were held in Belfort and Grenoble, France, and were organized by Captronic, a French public program to support innovation in electronic systems.
This one day seminar targets people who wish to understand the constraints and implications of using Android in embedded products, and know the steps to follow. The seminar is led by Maxime Ripard, Bootlin’sAndroid expert. Maxime is also the creator of Bootlin’sAndroid system development course.
Agenda
Morning
- General introduction to Android
- Opportunities to use Android in embedded systems which are neither phones nor tablets
- Details on Android’s architecture and how to customize it:
- Source code and compiling
- Android changes to the Linux kernel
- Bootloaders for Android
- Supporting new hardware
- Android filesystem layout
- Android native layers and calling a C program to access specific hardware
- Introduction to application development
- Customizing the system
- Using adb (Android Debug Bridge) for debugging and device remote access
- Advice and resources
Afternoon
- Completing the morning presentations (if necessary)
- Demonstrating multiple aspects of system development with Android:
- Getting sources and compiling
- Android emulator demonstration
- Starting Android on an electronic board with an ARM OMAP3530 processor, using a serial console.
- Adding support for specific buttons. “Back” button example.
- Using
adb: installing, accessing system logs, accessing a command line interface on the device, exchanging files with the PC. - Customizing the system: change the product name, the default wallpaper, add new properties.
- To access specific hardware (such as a USB device), development of a native library and accessing this functionality from the Android framework through a specific class and JNI library.
- Describing an application that allows to control a USB device.
- Questions and answers
Presentation slides
Note: see updates to these materials.
Presentation slides are available in PDF and LaTeX source formats. As usual, they are released under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution – ShareAlike 3.0 license. This means that you can reuse and modify them according to your own needs.
If you are interested in having one of us run such a seminar on your own part of the world, giving the audience the opportunity to ask all the questions they can have on the use of Android in embedded systems, don’t hesitate to contact us.
