Android Things – IoT Platform

developer.android.com

25 points·christop··6 comments

We've been working with the Android Things team at Google to create a great experience for getting started with Android Things on Raspberry Pi.

The end result is Rainbow HAT - a mixture of sensors, displays, sounds, and inputs all on a single HAT: https://shop.pimoroni.com/collections/new-products/products/...

If you have any questions feel free to ask!

Most interesting part: it has Java APIs for direct access to hardware over GPIO, PWM, UART, SPI, I2C. The intention is that all device access happens from application-level Java code, not at the kernel/HAL/framework level. This means devices will get kernel/framework updates directly from Google, no OEM in-between.

> Note: You cannot customize the behavior of device drivers in the Linux kernel or Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) to add new functionality to a device.

https://developer.android.com/things/sdk/drivers/index.html

What will this mean for speed/timing? Some IO is very timing sensitive, so much that python is too slow to handle it; I wonder if these abstractions will cause any problems.

What's the Google "dogfooding" scenario.

Because, absent that, I'm not going to place any trust in longevity.

Anyone know of a super cheap GSM network to utilize all these new IoT contraptions?

Appropriately enough, if you have Project Fi service you can request up to 9 data-only SIMs[1] that are only charged for however much they are used.

1: https://support.google.com/fi/answer/6330195?hl=en

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