What this book covers

Chapter 1, Introduction to Android and the BeagleBone Black, walks you through the process of installing the Android OS to your BeagleBone Black board. It also provides you with a list of hardware components that you will need to perform the activities throughout this book.

Chapter 2, Interfacing with Android, introduces you to several aspects of the BeagleBone Black's hardware and Android's Hardware Abstraction Layer. It describes how to make a few modifications to both your development environment and Android installed on your BeagleBone Black to allow Android apps to access the various hardware features of the BeagleBone Black.

Chapter 3, Handling Inputs and Outputs with GPIOs, guides you through building your very first hardware interfacing circuit and explains the details of a basic Android app that can communicate with it. This is your first step toward building much more complex apps that interact with the world outside your BeagleBone Black.

Chapter 4, Storing and Retrieving Data with I2C, expands on the basics from Chapter 3, Handling Inputs and Outputs with GPIOs, and explains how asynchronous background threads within your apps are used to communicate with hardware. It guides you through building a circuit that interfaces a nonvolatile memory chip to the BeagleBone Black and the implementation details of an app that interacts with the chip.

Chapter 5, Interfacing with High-speed Sensors Using SPI, explores creating apps that perform high-speed interfacing using a temperature and pressure sensor interfaced to the BeagleBone Black.

Chapter 6, Creating a Complete Interfacing Solution, combines the lessons learned about GPIO, I2C, and SPI interfacing from the previous chapters to create a single, complex hardware and software solution that uses all three interfaces to react to hardware events that originate from the outside world.

Chapter 7, Where to Go from Here, describes a few more of the hardware interfaces available on the BeagleBone Black, explains how to create more permanent Android hardware/software solutions, and gives you a few ideas for future projects to explore.