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Tag: Bus Stop

LED matrix displays and Android Things

September 21, 2017 /

In this post I will demonstrate how to use an LED matrix display with Android Things. I want to use an LED matrix display for my bus stop sign project. I have been using a character LCD which doesn’t give much visual impact. LED matrix displays are big and bright and can be seen clearly from a greater distance than character LCD displays.

 

That’s better

Hardware

The hardware for this project consists of:

  • An Android Things development board
  • an  stm32 development board (Blue Pill)
  • 3 32×64 LED dot matrix boards daisy chained together
  • a 5V power supply

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Showing Departures for Configured Stop

Configure Android Things using BLE

July 21, 2017 /

In my last experiment I used the Android Things developer console to create a factory image for my bus stop project. I then created an OTA update to update the bus stop apk ‘in the field.’ I concluded that experiment wondering how I was going to get my network credentials onto the device (without using adb). If your device doesn’t have a touchscreen or keyboard how are you going to get it onto your end user’s network. One possible solution to this problem is to use a companion app on the user’s phone to collect configuration information. With a companion app you get all of the UI niceness provided by that platform for ‘free.’ You still need to get the configuration from the phone to your Android Things device. This is where Bluetooth Low Energy comes in.

Bluetooth Low Energy

Bluetooth Low Energy is exactly the kind of short range wireless technology that can help out here. It’s relatively easy to implement using Android APIs and there’s no need for the device to be on a network to configure it. I can start with the BLE sample for Android Things that has almost everything I’m going to need.

For my bus stop project I have two things to configure that require end user input. I need to configure which stop number I want to display bus data for. I also need to get it onto a network to get real-time bus schedule information from a web API.

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It's alive

Hello Android Things Developer Console

June 30, 2017 /

This week Google released the developer console for Android Things. With this release, another piece of the puzzle is in place. The terms and conditions of the developer console it make clear that this is a developer preview, the number of devices you can push updates to is limited to 500, and you can use the console “for the sole purpose of internal development and testing of devices.” Don’t go out and try to sell anything yet. It looks as though actually distributing a product will require an additional, commercial agreement with Google.

I used the developer console to create an image for my (now deprecated) iMX6UL Wandaboard (bought especially for Android Things development, not that I’m bitter about it being deprecated so soon). The process is simple enough. The hardest part is figuring out how much of the device’s memory to reserve for an OEM partition. I went for a wildly pessimistic 128MB partition size, which is over kill for a 2MB app, but once set the partition size cannot be changed so I erred on the cautious side.

I created a product based on my bus stop project.

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