IoT with Android Things

Internet of Things!

Since the introduction of the Internet, there have been a lot of developments around it. But the most significant of them all is the Internet of Things (IoT).

The Internet of Things (IoT) is the concept of connecting hardware devices attached with (physical things, sensors, and actuators) embedded with software applications to a network (e.g. internet, wifi, bluetooth) to enable them to collect, analysis data, and take actions with minimal or no human interaction needed.

Some examples of how we use IoT now:

• Wearable Technology: Smart watches attach to our arms like bracelets to sense movement and pulses. They display back friendly charts and graphs of how many steps we take, our heart rate, blood pressure, ..etc.
  
  

• Agriculture: Sensors can sense soil moisture levels and automate irrigation systems to water the field when moisture levels are low.
   

• Many ideas of IoT that integrate with our daily life like: home automation, smart cities and smart parking systems.

Android Things

Android Things is an Android based embedded operating system platform announced by Google, at Google I/O 2015. It is simply stated as “Hardware based development”.

Android Things is an extension to the Android platform which allows you to build IoT Devices. Since all of you know Android Development, you can use existing software skills stack to build Android Things. If you are an Android Developer you can use familiar tools such as Android Studio and the Android SDK to easily develop IoT software, and then scale the hardware from a single prototype into production. Anyone from startups to large companies can build commercial products at scale.

Android Things enables you to build apps on top of popular hardware platforms like the (Raspberry Pi 3), and Board Support Package (BSP) is managed by Android Things SDK, so no kernel or firmware development is required and all you need to focus on is developing your software.

Power of Android Things lies in it’s Android core and have the support to use Google Cloud, Tensor Flow , Play Services, Assistant SDK and Firebase. We can perform Machine learning on the device, Java and Kotlin both can be used to build an IoT Device using Android Things.

Update over-the-air (OTA)

When you're ready to begin publishing your code to devices, the “Android Things Console” provides tools to install and update the system image on supported hardware devices.This allows you to push seamless updates to users in the field as well as test deployments on your own hardware.