Gadgetory

hello there my name's Gary Sims from Andrew authority now Google recently announced a new IOT operating system called Android things and the idea is that we replace our existing instead of things operating system called brillo and this time more emphasizing the compatibility with Android well i've downloaded it i've been using on a Raspberry Pi 3 and I've discovered how it all works so if you want to know what is Android things please let me explain so first I kind of look what is in set of things now it's basically any device it's connected to the Internet and it's performing a job or a function for us now while smartphones and laptops are key to the Internet they kind of connect to the internet because we're using them as tools but an IOT device is something that's more autonomous it stays on its own doing data gathering and doing tasks that we've assigned to do without very much human interaction so take the example of a weather station maybe it out in a field somewhere and it's taking different sensor readings and it's sending those back up into the cloud for analysis now that doesn't just mean weather stations we can talk about home automation we can talk about home security we can talk about smart cities we can talk about sort of factories and power plants and all these kind of things that have kind of autonomous aspects to them and they're using the Internet to send up the data to monitor what's going on so it's really it's sensors that are then sending up data into the cloud where we then analyze the information now of course we haven't really even come to fully understand all the different areas of which this idea of connected devices can work in our in our live streetlamps cars fridges refrigerators you know everything we can think of can be connects to the Internet if it can do a useful task now to build those products there has to be a element of computing power inside those devices so that's why you need a computer a chip and you need an operating system and it needs to have internet connectivity so Google have released Android things with the idea that they are going to want would you use the technology built on Android the knowledge they have of androids and always they have of Java to build IOT devices now of course it has to have a hardware component because it talked about devices here and what Google dinah they've supported three boards from the start and there are more boards coming on the way and those three boards are the Intel Edison which obviously an Intel x86 chip we've got the X nxp Pico which is an arm cortex a7 based chip and we've got the Raspberry Pi 3 which uses a quad-core cortex a53 chip at 64-bit so as you can see here we've got support for Intel processors and for ARM processors we've got 32-bit support and 64-bit support all the devices come with at least half a gigabyte of memory and we're running at 500 megahertz or 1 gigahertz now that's quite different to the other types of IOT kits that we have which are ones that are running on microcontrollers now microcontrollers run at very different speeds I run that maybe only 96 megahertz or forty eight megahertz they might only have maybe a 256 K of RAM 128 K or Ram a very very very much smaller power requirement much smaller hardware requirements now Android things can't run on those because I hang droid is of course based on Linux and Linux is a full multitasking operating system with virtual memory support which means you need a complicated MMU memory management unit and you only find those in things like the cortex a series and Intel's x86 series now this option to go with Android rather than with a microcontroller type of design could be a great benefit because we have such great powerful computers in our IOT devices maybe things like voice recognition and maybe facial recognition and maybe kind of picture detection and some level of AI could happen in the IOT devices which would be very useful because we have such power there but at the same time it does raise the full of the entry level do I really need a chord core sort of one gigahertz processor in my fridge so you know there is this kind of disk you know Googler specifically aiming for one type part of the market with Android things and it's missing out on a whole other part of the market now whether that's a good idea or a bad idea only time will tell so I'm using a Raspberry Pi 3 which really is a good idea that Google support is because it really is a very popular board I wouldn't even know where to buy an Intel Edison board but Raspberry Pi I think I've got like five of them here in my house so they really are the most popular platform for this kind of thing and so the way it works is issue download the image for the Raspberry Pi you copied onto an SD card you boot up the ACE they rise with pie with that SD card and you're instantly into Android things now during the boot up process you kind of see at the beginning a few lines of boot up information kind of reminiscent to a kind of a Linux machine booting up then after a few seconds you get the splash screen which shows you Android things booting up with a kind of a small moving dots just to show that things are working and they'll find at the end you just get the Android thing screen comes up which does nothing there's no user interface it's just this is made to be a disguised loan device it just sits there and tells you whether it has Internet connectivity or not that's all that's all it does but the real power comes when you start developing apps for it now to develop apps you need to use Android studio at least Android studio 2.2 and your SDK needs to be at least at the level API level 24 so that's kind of Android seven now once you have that you can then start using Android things and you can build an app in a very similar way to you build an Android app you've got the normal things as a manifest file there's resource files for the layout written in XML there's Java code in there and very similar to the way you'd write an Android app you right now Android things up and then once it's built you connect over the Ethernet to the board when you've set that before using ADB you can kind of connect to it through Ethernet or through Wi-Fi and then you connect to that board and it can upload flashes the app onto your board now once an app has been flashed on there whenever you reboot it it reboots directly into that app now there are two types of Android things applications there are those with displays and there are those without displays now the with display ones basically work in a very similar way to Android apps you've got the normal layout that you do inside of Android studio you've got the same UI toolkit you get in Android and you can build divider apps that run on these devices with a screen but there's a few differences no status bar at the top there's no buttons at on-screen buttons to go back and forth you just get the whole real estate is occupied by your app and of course that's going to be useful for maybe types of kiosks for some types of products that have touchscreens people are going to want to be able to run this kind of user interface on their IOT device but there are gonna be lots of IOT devices that don't need a display at all and so and Ruthie's caters for that as well you can write a device an app store that has no display whatsoever but it does network things it collects sensor data it sends them up to the cloud and all of the stuff you get inside of Android all of the access to the Google cloud services you can get with an Android things app that doesn't have a display but of course the one big difference between an Android smartphone and an Android things board is that we also have access to the hardware now that means access to things like the different general purpose input output pins and also two other types of butters and technologies including I squared C including SPI including serial port and those are all available inside of Android things if you want to do pulse code modulation to control a servo then Android things knows how to do that already if you want talk to I squared C to a particular device maybe to an LCD screen then it or Android things only knows how to do that if you want to talk spi to some non-volatile memory then Android thing to already knows how to do that so they've built in all that hardware support the lowest level of hardware so you can talk to sensors and accelerometers and GPS units and all these kind of things and build an IOT product that is able to do complicated and useful things including cameras of course and that leads to the whole possibility of things like facial recognition and our object recognition and computer vision in general so let me just show you a quick demo of what Android things can do this is a demo that Google provide it shows us how to make a simple user interface and it also shows us how Android things can talk to hardware in this case an LED which we're going to make a switch on and off so the device has now booted up and here is this simple demo from Google it shows a picture of a ball in the middle of the screen over on the right hand side there little switches that allow you to turn the different GPIO pins on and off now the LED i've got connected is connected to GPIO 21 and over here we can see we got a mouse you can use a touchscreen as well if you've got touchscreen Hardware connect it up to a board and if I click here you can see that the LED comes on we click it goes off ticket goes on piggy goes off and of course I could have many LEDs many different inputs and outputs here but I can control manually so this is showing us a graphical UI with Android things and control of hardware directly with Android things now at the moment this is a Developer Preview that there is running on the Raspberry Pi and the other board and it really is a preview because there are some big holes in Google's vision for Android things the first and most obvious biggest hold is there's no deployment mechanism at the moment what I mean by that at the moment if you want to talk to the board you have to set things up using ADB you have to connect the board and then you kind of flash things over and then ADB kind of some type of disconnect and there's a whole problem I found with it kind of disconnecting after a few minutes and if you want to set up Wi-Fi you kind of type in this complicated command which for a delta belapur is not so bad but for a user will never would never work at all for them to kind of kind of get the Wi-Fi connection up and running now Google need to have a deployment system either means a generic app that can work with all internecine boards that they just say here's our Internet of Things can control app and you kind of find your device and you can kind of do lots of things with a nice user interface on your mobile phone or they need to release the source code for a generic app that people can tailor for their particular intent of a think device because at the moment no way of handling that process at all you can't actually ship a product yet that's usable by a consumer at the at the end level the other problem is that Google really have set the system requirement quite high by opting for kind of Android and Linux and a complicated CPU they really have set the entry level higher than maybe some IOT developers would like we're talking like half a gigabyte of RAM here and that's that's that cost money we're talking about complicated processor that cost money much much different to the prices of the low-end microcontroller board now with that the right decision or not we'll find out in the future Google are really betting that the technology of Android and the people's knowledge of Android developers knowledge of of Java will be the key selling point that people so I can take that same experience in fact it takes on the same code that I've already got and I can use it directly in my new IOT product and their banking that really is the way people are going to think I'm not sure that's going to be true but time will be the judge of that what my name is guys in from and royal authority I hope you enjoyed this quick overview of Android things if you did please do give it a thumbs up also difficut to subscribe to handle authorities youtube channel download Endre thority app because that will give you access to all of our news and features directly on your mobile phone and last but not least don't forget to over to Android or Thor chicom because we are your source for all things Android