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Google To Bring Official Android Support To the Raspberry Pi 3 (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader shares an Ars Technica report: The Raspberry Pi 3 is not hurting for operating system choices. The tiny ARM computer is supported by several Linux distributions and even has a version of Windows 10 IoT core available. Now, it looks like the Pi is about to get official support for one of the most popular operating systems out there: Android. In Google's Android Open Source Project (AOSP) repository, a new device tree recently popped up for the Raspberry Pi 3. The AOSP device tree contains mostly Nexus devices with the occasional "generic" entry or developer board tossed into the mix. It's rare to see a non-Google device in AOSP, so it seems Google has taken quite a shine to the tiny computer. With officially supported source code, it should be much easier for hackers to get Android up and running on the Pi 3. And once that's done, you should be able to sideload more than 1.5 million apps onto the Pi to make the device do whatever you want.
More choice for what is essentially a "hackers" device. It isn't a bad thing!
Surely if Google support it then you just download then in a sane fashion from the play store. And this should be pretty awesome since the Pi could run YouTube, Netflix, Kodi, pretty much anything that Android supports.
I think Android Auto on a Raspberry Pi for my car would be amazing.
>> Google To Bring Official Android Support To the Raspberry Pi 3
>> Google Steps Up Pressure on Partners Tardy in Updating Android
OK, Google. Which is it? (Because I'm pretty sure there will be a lot of Pi "makers" who never touch a thing once they get their shoestring operations working.)
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You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
So this is a win for the student and hobbyist, but not worth much beyond being a rapid prototype test bed for the commercial world.
Seeing as how the Pi is designed to democratize access to hardware for students and hobbyists, I'm not sure Google is too worried about that.
Somebody who wants a commercial run of units can have a machine custom-built in China for less than the Pi3 costs.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
RPi boots from an SD-Card. Anyone can download and upgrade, without any help from the manufacturer.
Will they support "standard" IO hats, like the sense modules with accel, gyro, etc.?
I think not for a very long time - which makes many of the interesting apps not interesting at all.
"Will the battery last very long on my Pi running Android?"
The Pi does not come with a battery so what are you talking about?
"Will there be support for any cellular devices so I can talk, text and/or run data any time soon?"
Huh??? Use a USB cellular modem and VOIP?
"Face it, the Pi is not much more than a toy, a cheap learning device used to teach in places where the cost of even a low end computer is too much. Great for teaching and learning, not so great as a basis of any kind of practical commercial hardware design."
Uhhh...... It is a practical commercial hardware design and has sold a lot of units. The Pi 3 is not designed to be the heart of a commercial hardware design. You can use it as a prototype and then buy the parts and use the pi as a reference design. You can use it as the heart of one off commercial design.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
If the makers never touch a thing and upgrade to the latest version, that's on the makers not Google. Google just needs to provide the long term support to allow makers to upgrade if they choose.
The 2nd article you mention is for OEMs and carriers that abandon support for a phone about 2 seconds after they launch the phone. Google publishes the updates, but it's up to the OEMs and carriers to integrate those fixes into their product lines.
My flagship Galaxy S4 for T-Mobile came with 4.2.2 JellyBean in mid 2013. 2 years later it had been upgraded all the way to 4.4.4 where it made it ultimately up to 4.4.4 Kitkat by September 2015 where it never has progressed past. Lollipop was available in October 2014 and Marshmallow in October 2015. Yet nothing for my phone. It wasn't that I elected not to upgrade, it was just that there was no official update available.
I'll be curious if they manage to support the media codec framework. Broadcom opened up some of the internals for the VideoCore for handling graphics acceleration but they have held onto the codec support for licensing reasons.
Google To Surveil Raspberry Pi 3 Users Via Android Operating System
Or, alternately:
Google To Add Raspberry Pi 3 To It's Global Botnet
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
I did some testing on my Raspberry Pi running on a pair of 18650 Li-Ion batteries inside a generic USB charger and I got about 5.5 hours while the Raspberry Pi was mostly idle. With the Raspberry Pi running Quake 3 Demo loop, I was able to keep it running for about 4.5 hours. I don't think the Raspberry Pi supports really low power modes, or the operating system never puts it in low power like most phones do, because on a similar amount of battery power most phones would probably at least stay alive for an entire day when they are idle. Especially because I wasn't running a screen or any radios while using the Raspberry Pi.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Let me know when they have a Pi 3 with 2GB or more. With only 1GB, Android is awful. 1GB was OK until KitKat... now it isn't. 1GB is spacious with ICS, but not with LP...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
That's the point. The RPI can use externally controlled sensors, rather than true phone sensors.
Why UNIX?
With a Xiaomi 10000 mAh power bank attached to my Pi 2 Model B running Raspbian desktop (but idle, other than a script writing the uptime to a file every minute), I got 13 hours and 46 minutes before the power ran out. I wonder if the Pi port of Android will support the Pi 2 Model B too? It'll be annoying if it doesn't, because the Pi 3 wasn't a massive upgrade over the Pi 2 Model B.
Not really. The Pi is purpose built as a way to train programmers and is not well suited for interfacing to the outside world. Sure, you can buy add on cards that do things like buffer the I/O pins and provide power and the like, but If you are a business concern, there are much better suited devices than the Pi to consider which are from manufacturers who are interested in the same issues you are. If you end up using the Pi, you will be stuck re-engineering the thing to do just about anything I can imagine is useful commercially, and I can imagine a lot.
Say, for instance, you had a "smart appliance" idea where you where trying to add some kind of smart display to a kitchen appliance, put it on the customer's WiFi network and do some kind of wizardry. Yes, you could use your Pi, drop on a pre-made touch screen, hack up some user interfaces, but try doing that and then adding a couple of channels of inputs for a couple of sensors and a couple of outputs to turn stuff on and off and you are doing some serious prototype design just to get the Pi off the ground. There are prototype ready kits out there from Intel (and other chip makers) which may be a few thousand dollars so hobbyist's don't use them, but are purpose built for this kind of work and well worth the cost for the commercial concern. They come with pre-designed and proven interfaces you can use off the shelf saving time and money. You can use a Pi, but it's going to cost you.
So, I'm not dissing the Pi, it's great for what it's built for. I'm just saying that it's not really the proper tool for designing and prototyping embedded computer systems. It wasn't built for that...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Videos of Natalie Portman are blocked. It only allows you to watch Nathan Fillion.
What's cool is that you can just swap the SD card to run a different OS, so you can have a wallet of SD cards with different OSes to run.
Wirth's law may be blocking these devices from getting an upgrade to the next major version of Android if the device's RAM size or disk performance does not meet the minimum system requirements of the next major version. I can speak from experience that for some devices, though an update was issued, it never should have been. Android 4.4 "KitKat" on the Nexus 7 (2012) "grouper" tablet is fine; Android 5 "Lollipop" on the same hardware is a jank-fest, with the UI often freezing for five or ten seconds at a time. All reports that I've read imply that the jankiness is caused by ASUS cheaping out on slow NAND flash memory. Clearing the cache helps some but not all users in this situation. It's like the last version of iOS that Apple releases for a given iPhone model: its increased system demands often bog down the UI to the point where some users end up assuming it is an intentional measure to get people to replace otherwise working hardware.
is a size of battery, like AA, AAA, etc, not the amount of power it has. They say they have 3000 mAh, but the cheaper ones tend to exaggerate on the rating from what I understand. They only run at 3.7 v so there is some inefficiency in converting it over to the 5v required by the Raspberry Pi.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Nobody cares about making cheap touchscreen displays. You can't manufacture a cheap consumer product out of the raspberry pi because adding a display increases to cost too much.