FOSDEM 2019
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Lightning Talks
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Running Android on the Raspberry Pi

Running Android on the Raspberry Pi

Android Pie meets Raspberry Pi

Track: Lightning Talks
Room: H.2215 (Ferrer)
Day: Saturday
Start: 17:40
End: 17:55

You can run Android on a wide range of devices, not just phones and tablets. Building Android from scratch is fun and a great way to learn about the lower levels of the operating system. Imagine - here is a chance to create ANY Android configuration you want.

In this presentation, I will describe how to take a Raspberry Pi 3 and build Android completely from scratch, using source code from the AOSP (Android Open Source Project). One issue is finding an implementation of the OpenGL ES libraries and GPU drivers with the appropriate Android additions. Luckily, there is a cross-platform graphics layer called SwiftShader that we can use. Another pain point is that the Raspberry Pi doesn’t have a USB OTG port, so we can’t use adb in the normal way. No problem, we can use adb over Ethernet instead.

This presentation focuses on the Raspberry Pi, but in a similar way you can port Android to many other devices. If it can run Linux, there is a good chance it can run Android.