Gadgetory

on the pocket now power users so far this season we've talked mainly about hardware today we're going to bridge the gap I'm Joe Levi with pocket now here's what you need to know about the hardware abstraction layer begin with this topic is well let's just call it very geeky it's an interesting concept to understand but it's a concept that's been deployed in various different ways and different methodologies across the various platforms from iOS to Android to Linux windows and as/400 computers not all of the terminology is a one-for-one match but the concepts are trying to get across today so if I say hardware abstraction layer versus kernel level versus device driver know that to a certain extent in this context those terms can be used interchangeably we'll do that a little today in the video so far we've talked primarily about hardware and that's great because hardware it's wide its varied there's a lot of it and even when we're talking about say an SOC there's a whole bunch of stuff to consider today we're going to talk not about software but the thing that's in between the hardware abstraction layer the API the drivers the kernel no no those are not all the same thing and I probably just made half of you I may be your brains explode by lumping them all together depending on the platform that you're using this hardware abstraction and we'll get to that definition in just a minute this hardware abstraction can happen at any one of those different locations or a few of them combined kind of confusing so let's get into it hardware is hardware it's physical components it's stuff that you can look at and see it's a chip it's an antenna it's a screen it's a digitizer it's tangible software on the other hand is the stuff that we use we write code and it makes stuff happen it has instructions that tell that display I want you to make button that says this and looks like this and put it right here when you push on it it does this when you unhook it it does that that's essentially a computer programming in a nutshell there's a lot more to it of course but that kind of gives you the gist of things let's step away from mobile technology just for a minute and go back to kind of the ancient days when we had das and we had mainframes and we had a s for hundreds if you wanted to write a program for those environments you could write the program but if you wanted it to do anything you pretty much had to write the driver interface yourself you want to be able to print you've got to write a lot of what that printer needs for your software to say here's this letter that I just wrote to mom and now I want to translate that from dots on a screen to dots on a printed page HP printers well you had to talk to one way and all of the other printers you had to talk to another way and NEC printers were a different way and every one was different it's kind of a pain because if you wanted to get a really good word processor the developers that were writing the code for that had to take a good portion of their time and not make a good word processor they had to write print drivers so that you could print the stuff out onto paper for thousands upon thousands of pieces of hardware doesn't sound very efficient right it wasn't moving forward to today even in computer technology we have this abstraction layer so when I want to print something I say file print there send it off it translates all of that stuff and puts it into the hardware into a head moving across a page putting dots down or putting toner down however it may be and you get a printed sheet of paper out the other side the driver there is written in this case by HP HP makes the driver for their printer so that the word processing person doesn't have to okay so let's come back over to mobile technology I'm gonna use Android as an example here primarily because it suits the the illustrative point but the same thing applies to Windows Phone simply comply some blackberry same thing applies to Apple the reason I'm using Android is there are a lot of people a lot of different manufacturers that make hardware for Android devices and Android is kind of the one unified operating system there's some differences in some nuances and whatnot but let's pretend for this example we have two different pieces of hardware made by two different companies let HTC and Samsung let's say both of them running stock Android not sense not touch with stock Android so the operating system is quote identical there are some nuances there but those usually come in drivers in that hardware abstraction in the kernel any one of those places can do certain types of hardware abstraction so now when I touch the screen whatever hardware it is that I have powering my screen capacitive Hardware if I've got super LCD or AMOLED or whatever kind of display I had to be able to see it all of that has to come through this translation layer essentially as a developer I can say I want a button to appear on the screen that's this big this color says this word and when I push on it it does this that's all I have to do from there the operating system says this is what a button should look like and it talks to the driver it talks to the screen and says here put these dots here in this configuration and listens for that touch pad that touch input to feel my finger press on that button and once that happens it does something else entirely and it goes on and does its own thing the developer who put that button on the screen doesn't have to know if your capacitive or resistive or super LCD or AMOLED it doesn't need to know any of that because all that has been removed to this separate layer an abstract layer where you just have to say give me a button that looks like this and when I press it make it do that beautiful now behind the scenes that button may be saying report my GPS location on the screen it's got all these different pieces of hardware behind that API that can find out where you are from your altimeter to your digital compass to Wi-Fi to help triangulate your location to its cellular to help you trying the other your location to to GPS whether that's a GPS or glass notes or anything else and who knows what else we're going to get in the future but all of those are made by different manufacturers so you need another layer to go out and get that information translate it back pass it back through the location API and back into the app that's a lot of stuff that's happening and if the person who said I want to know where you are had to write the code to do that for all those tougher pieces of hardware their software wouldn't be that great they're spending all of that time at doing all of this other work so that's really the purpose of that hardware abstraction layer again whether it's a hal proper or drivers or api's or even in the kernel or various combinations of all of them the hal is becoming a much more abstract concept it's becoming much more useful much more powerful and its really what enables us to bridge the gap from hardware and software and brings the whole thing together thank you very much for watching if you liked the video and think you learned something please give it a thumbs up and if you want to make sure you don't miss out on anything that we're going to do in the future hit that subscribe button down below for PocketNow sharing information about the how and how your device works a little bit of why it does what it does I'm Joe Levi I'll catch you next time