Chapter 8. Beyond the Smartphone

In Chapter 7, Tailoring Your Personal Android System, you learned how to add the final personal touch to your custom Android system. You customized both the application layer and the system layer: new menus, new apps, and new daemons.

In this chapter, we are going even further: we are going outside the smartphone, connecting to external microcontrollers, sensors, and different devices. We will see how our whole world could be connected and interactive with Android.

You will learn about Android ADK and Arduino, and how Google is filling our lives with Android-oriented devices: from Chromecast devices to Android Auto, from smart watches to Internet of Things.

Meeting Arduino

More than ten years ago, in a bar in a small Italian town, a group of students and researchers created a low-cost microcontroller that would revolutionize the world of DIY (Do It Yourself)—Arduino, shown in the next image:

The latest version of Ardunio (or Genuino, for the non-USA market) is called Arduino UNO. Uno means one in Italian and this codename celebrates the first stable version of the IDE (Integrated Development Environment) that comes with the board itself. This board is based on ATmega328P by Atmel and provides a set of controllable input/output pins. It can work as a standalone microcontroller, once it has been properly programmed, and can be used via its USB connection.

The greatest feature of Arduino is its open nature: everything, from the hardware schematics to the development IDE, has been open source since day one. This openness, and the extensible design of the board, allowed manufactures and advanced users to create an infinite number of so-called shields...

Exploring the possibilities of the Internet of Things

Knowing that your favorite OS can run on thousands of devices, in hundreds of different customizations, and communicate with any kind of device, both wired or wireless, opens up incredible possibilities.

Android Auto

In 2014, Google presented Android Auto, an innovative project that aims to command an Android system using the controls already available in our cars:

In 2015, the first version of Android Auto was released and the developer community started to really look into it. In 2016, dozens of car manufacturers are going to release models with integrated Android Auto support.

The idea behind Android Auto is to support driving safety and provide users with an alternative way to access their devices when they are driving. To achieve this goal, Google engineers worked with car manufacturers to create a bridge between our Android devices and car dashboards.

Car dashboards and controls represent the top of the user experience and interaction...

Domotics

We are living in a world where lots of devices, appliances, and "things" that were disconnected are now part of a growing ecosystem of interconnected devices. We came from a past where computation could happen only in our computers—we are living in a present where computation happens in our pockets, with our smartphone. We are moving toward a future where computation will happen everywhere: a watch, a car, a drone, a house, a garden, and much more.

We had thermostats that had to be commanded manually and we have intelligent thermostats now, such as Google Nest, that learn from our habits and react accordingly to create a better and more effective user experience:

We had lights that needed a wall switch to be turned ON and OFF and now we have intelligent lights, such as Philips Hue, that can be controlled via smartphone or even smart watch. These lights can turn ON automatically the moment we approach our home, taking advantage of concepts such as geo-fencing. We have light that can...

Can a green droid entertain you?

Once humanity satisfied every basic need, it started fighting boredom!

Okay, probably that's too much drama, but we are entering the entertaining section, so let's talk about having some fun!

Multimedia

Entertainment is a huge market and Google jumped into it pretty quickly with its Nexus Player and its Chromecast devices:

The previous image shows the latest model of Google Chromecast. When Google approached this market, they decided to provide users with a device that was as easy as possible to set up. Google Chromecast has one HDMI connector and a USB power cable; that's it. You connect the HDMI to your TV, connect the power supply, and your TV can now connect to your smart phone.

Your smartphone becomes your remote and, with a few clicks, you can start streaming any multimedia content you want, straight to your TV: your preferred YouTube channels, your preferred movies from Google Play Store, your music from Google Play Music and hundreds of third-party apps...

Summary

Our journey is over! It's been quite a rollercoaster, from the history of the operating system to how it can equip devices ready to communicate with the external world. You learned how to retrieve the source code for your devices, how to navigate the source folder tree, and how to create the perfect setup to properly build a vanilla Android system.

You stepped up and started to add customizations to your system, to enrich the user experience, to improve the performance, and to add support for your own hardware. You went deep into the boot sequence's inner structure to customize the system even more. You swam back to the surface to customize the highest part of the architecture pyramid, the user interface, to provide your users with the ultimate customized Android system.

Finally, you saw how easy it is to step away from the Android device itself and find a whole world of devices waiting to communicate and interact, powered by the awesome Android platform.

Our journey is over, but your...