Making a Headless Android Device
NDC TechTown 2017
Patricia Aas and Johan Herland, 23 October 2017
Making a Headless Android Device
This talk explores the options when trying to bring up a device using an Android Board Support Package (BSP) or AOSP. In particular the options when you don't want to ship a traditional Android device or you have an existing Embedded Linux code base, but all you have available is Android. Headless can mean both be an Android without Java and a device without a display, both are discussed.
Today most SOCs come with an Android BSP, some with no other option. This has been the case for several years and many vendors from traditional Linux Embedded have shipped Headless-Android Devices.
This talk describes this type of architecture, and the choices and difficulties you are faced with when trying to ship a traditional Linux Embedded system on a Headless-Android base. We will describe a system with a kiosk-mode type web GUI and therefore also talk about how to integrate Chromium in an embedded environment.