The web site for the AOSP and AAOS Meetup has moved to https://aospandaaos.github.io/
This is the first in a series of blogs about Android Automotive OS
Android Automotive OS (AAOS) is a version of Android designed to run in a vehicle head unit and provide the “In Vehicle Infotainment” (IVI) system. In modern vehicles, the IVI system controls the heating and ventilation, provides audio streaming, shows the rear-view (and side view) cameras, offers navigation … and many other things besides.
This is a problem that I ran across recently. Building the whole AOSP code base is a big task, and normally you would choose a machine with plenty of RAM. But, sometimes you need to build on a lesser machine. It happened to me when I was on the road and I wanted to run a build on my laptop, which has 8 GiB RAM, and a dual core hyper-threaded Intel i7 CPU. I have used this set up with Marshmallow and earlier versions without problem – it just takes a while, that’s all.
Chris Simmonds has been working on ports of Android to the BeagleBone Black for several years, since he posted the first tutorial on running JellyBean 4.3.
Now all of that work has been consolidated into the Android4Beagle project. Android4Beagle aims to provide a vanilla Android build, based on AOSP. Currently, builds are available for KitKat, Lollipop and Marshmallow, with Nougat in the works.
Update: Brillo was abandoned by Google in December 2016 in favour of Android Things
Brillo (https://developers.google.com/brillo/) is Google's operating system for devices that are connected to the IoT. They communicate with each other, with the cloud and with mobile apps using a system called Weave (https://developers.google.com/weave/). Brillo and Weave are still under wraps: you have to request an invite from the two links in order to get access to documentation, sample code, and so on. However, there is enough information publicly available to build and test a device running Brillo, which is what this blog is about. I hope to cover Weave in a later post.
Brillo is actually a cut-down version of Android. Basically, all the Java components have been stripped away leaving a much simpler embedded Linux operating system. When building Brillo, some things pop out immediately, which may give a preview of future Android builds:
Below, I show how to build and run the Brillo emulator
Update: This page is out of date. I have put together all of the information on running Android on BeagelBone on the Android4Beagle page
After a little bit of tweaking I have got my port of Android KitKat up and running on the BeagleBone Black. For some background on why I am doing this, read my previous post about Android on the BeagleBone Black
Update: This page is out of date. I have put together all of the information on running Android on BeagelBone on the Android4Beagle page
A little while ago I wrote Building Jelly Bean 4.3 AOSP for Beaglebone Black which describes how to install Android on a micro SD card and boot the BeagleBone from it. Then I did some research on integrating fastboot into U-Boot and wrote Android fastboot for BeagleBone Black. Now I am bringing the two together.
I did think about editing the first article, but I think it is cleaner to have a new tutoruial that works for the new use case.
Update: This page is out of date. I have put together all of the information on running Android on BeagelBone on the Android4Beagle page
This blog post describes how to use vanilla AOSP Jelly Bean 4.3 source to build and run Android on the BeagleBone Black development board. All components are built from source (well, nearly all: the GPU drivers contain some binary blobs).