Android Things Explained! - Tech-Walk
About this article
In this article, we are going to talk about Google's new IoT initiative based on Android called Android Things.Android Things
It was back in may 2015 that Google announced project Brillo as its IoT Operating System, but having looked at the feedback it received from developers about Brillo, Google decided to ditch it and create Android Things. Sounds similar to the Internet of Things right? Google has just added Android to IoT and developers are able to use familiar Android SDKs, APIs, and services including Google cloud platform.Android Things is only a preview at the moment and there is much to be done, however, enough of the final operating system is working so that developers can start creating projects on Android Things. Android Things currently supports three boards - Intel Edison, the NXP Pico i.MX6UL and the Raspberry Pi 3. Support for NXP argon i.MX6UL is coming soon and the first thing you will notice is that these boards use a mixture of Intel and ARM based CPUs and that both 32-bits and 64-Bits are supported. The minimum amount of RAM is 512MB and all these boards have Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.
Installation of Android Things
Installation is quite simple and similar to other installing other operating systems. I have a Raspberry Pi 3 and for which you just have to download the correct Android Things image for the board and .img file which is actually wrapped in a .zip file and write it to a microSD Card. The final step is to boot the Pi with the card inside it and the monitor plugged with the power supply like we do for any other Operating System.Android Things took around 90 Seconds to boot on the Raspberry Pi 3 and first shows the boot information and Linux like boot screen which is later replaced by Android Things loading screen with three dots that are pulsating.