Android Things Hits Developer Preview 2

Google’s newly-rechristened Internet of Things (IoT) effort, called Android Things, hits Developer Preview 2 this week.

As you may recall, Google announced Android Things back in December and released a first Developer Preview at that time. Previously codenamed “Project Brillo”, Android Things lets developers create always-updated smart devices using Android APIs and Google services.

Today, in keeping with its plan to update Android Things every 6-8 weeks, Google has announced a second Developer Preview release of this new platform.

“Android Things is a comprehensive solution to building Internet of Things (IoT) products with the power of Android,” Google’s Wayne Piekarski explains. “It includes familiar tools such as Android Studio, the Android Software Development Kit (SDK), Google Play Services, and Google Cloud Platform. Android Things supports a System-on-Module (SoM) architecture, where a core computing module can be initially used with development boards and then easily scaled to large production runs with custom designs, while continuing to use the same Board Support Package (BSP) from Google.”

Android Things Developer Preview 2 includes the following improvements and additions:

Improved support for USB audio. The Intel Edison and Raspberry Pi 3 now support USB audio. (This was available on NXP Pico previously.)

Peripheral I/O (PIO) improvements. Google says it has fixed many PIO bugs in this release.

Intel Joule support. This release is the first to support the Intel Joule platform, which Google says offers the most computing power in its IoT lineup to date.

Native I/O and user drivers. This release adds improved support for Android’s NDK capabilities, which lets developers used native languages like C or C++ instead of Java.

You can find out more from the Android Developers Blog.

Tagged with Internet of Things, Android Things, IoT

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Comments (5)

5 responses to “Android Things Hits Developer Preview 2”

217

Oh yeah, Android Things. I'm surprised Google hasn't already forgotten about it.

5 years ago

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  In reply to dcdevito :
  
  Why would they? Google Cloud Next is coming up in March. There's a boot camp for IoT on GCP. It wouldn't take much to bring Android data over to the platform either.
  
  https://cloudnext.withgoogle.com/bootcamps/iot
  
  5 years ago
  
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5812

Can't wait to see if this has what the IOT crowd is looking for. IOT has been done with very little secuity and updating in mind on the low end items you can currently buy like cameras which cost little but have virtually flawed security. I'd be much happier knowing that the device runs on something with security and updates in mind then what the low end is using now like a locked default password that can't be changed allowing bot nets to grow and nothing the user can do but unplug the device.

5 years ago

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  In reply to Nicholas_Kathrein :
  
  I think that many IoT devices could benefit from running entirely out of read-only memory without the ability to update the code image (yes, getting it right the first time would be required). It would also require a Harvard architecture so that anything injected into RAM isn't executable. At a minimum, this would make it very difficult to turn the device into a bot and in some cases impossible.
  
  5 years ago
  
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6593

In reply to dcdevito :

Who comes up with these names? How about Android Crap or The Dung Of Android? That second one sounds like an old Star Trek ep.

5 years ago

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