Easily Program RP2040 Boards With Your Android Device

October 11, 2024 by 8 Comments

You could write your microcontroller code on your desktop PC, or you could do it on your laptop on the go. Or, if you want to get really portable about things, you could write your embedded code on your phone. Enter DroidScript.

Basically, DroidScript is a JavaScript and Python IDE for Android phones and tablets. Simple enough. You can use it to write apps for your phone or tablet. But its party piece? You can now also use it to program for embedded devices—namely, a range of those based on the RP2040 microcontroller. For example, the Adafruit QT-Py RP2040, the Pimoroni TinyFX, or the Pimoroni Yukon. They run MicroPython and CircuitPython, and you can program them from DroidScript. Easy.

A decade ago, this would have been a royal pain in the butt. But today? It’s easy, because the smartphones and devboards both use USB-C connectors. All you need is a regular USB-C cable and you can hook straight up to the board and burn your code.

You can get the app on the Google Play Store if you’re so inclined. We’ve seen some other neat smartphone programming projects over the years, too. Meanwhile, if you’ve found any other nifty ways to get your code on to a dev board, don’t hesitate to let us know!

A Clean Linux Installation For An Android TV Box

September 3, 2024 by 22 Comments

Although Android technically runs on top of Linux, generally most Android devices abstract away the underlying Linux-ness of these machines. In theory this is a good thing; we wouldn’t necessarily want to live in a world where we have to log in to a command-line interface just to make a phone call. But too much abstraction often needlessly restricts the capabilities of the underlying hardware. [Murray] a.k.a [Green Bug-Eyed Monster] has an Android TV box with just such a problem, as the Android OS included with it allows for watching TV just fine, but with a few tweaks it can run a full Linux installation instead, turning it into a much more versatile machine.

This specific Android TV box is based on the Rockchip 3566, a popular single-board computer used in a wide array of products. As such it is one of the easier targets for transforming a limited TV machine into a fully capable desktop computer. The first step is to compile an Armbian image for the machine, in this case using an x86 installation of Ubuntu to cross-compile for the ARM-based machine. With a viable image in hand, there’s an option to either solder on a microSD slot to the included pins on the computer’s PCB or to flash the image directly to the on-board eMMC storage by tricking the machine into thinking that the eMMC is missing. Either option will bring you into a full-fledged Linux environment, with just a few configuration steps to take to get it running like any other computer.

[Murray] began this process as an alternative to paying the inflated prices of Raspberry Pis over the past few years, and for anyone in a similar predicament any computer with the Rockchip 3566 processor in it could be a potential target for a project like this. You might need to make a few tweaks to the compile options and hardware, but overall the process should be similar. And if you don’t have an RK3566, don’t fret too much. We’ve seen plenty of other Android TV boxes turned into similar devices like this one which runs RetroPie instead.

Lindroid Promises True Linux On Android

June 18, 2024 by 16 Comments

Since Android uses Linux, you’d think it would be easier to run Linux apps on your Android phone or tablet. There are some solutions out there, but the experience is usually less than stellar. A new player, Lindroid, claims to provide real Linux distributions with hardware-accelerated Wayland on phones. How capable is it? The suggested window manager is KDE’s KWIN. That software is fairly difficult to run on anything but a full-blown system with dbus, hardware accelerations, and similar features.

There are, however, a few problems. First, you need a rooted phone, which isn’t totally surprising. Second, there are no clear instructions yet about how to install the software. The bulk of the information available is on an X thread. You can go about 4 hours into the very long video below to see a slide presentation about Lindroid.

Continue reading “Lindroid Promises True Linux On Android” →

Google Removes RISC-V Support From Android

May 3, 2024 by 20 Comments

Last year the introduction of  RISC-V support to the Android-specific, Linux-derived Android Common Kernel (ACK) made it seem that before long Android devices might be using SoCs based around the RISC-V ISA, but it would seem that these hopes are now dashed. As reported by Android Authority, with a series of recently accepted patches this RISC-V support was stripped again from the ACK. While this doesn’t mean that Android cannot be made to work on RISC-V, any company interested would have to do all of the heavy lifting themselves, which might include Qualcomm with their recently announced RISC-V-based smartwatch Snapdragon SoC.

No reason was provided by Google for this change, and the official statement from Google to Android Authority says that Google is not ready to provide a single supported Android Generic Kernel Image (GKI), but that ‘Android will continue to support RISC-V’. This change however, removes RISC-V kernel support from the ACK, and since Google only certifies Android builds which ship with a GKI featuring an ACK, this effectively means that RISC-V is not supported at this point, and likely won’t be for the foreseeable future.

As discussed on Hacker News, a potential reason might be the very fragmentary nature of the RISC-V ISA, which makes a standard RISC-V kernel very complicated if you want to support more than a (barebones) profile. This is also supported by a RISC-V mailing list thread, where ‘expensive maintenance’ is mentioned for why Google doesn’t want to support RISC-V.

Webserver Runs On Android Phone

March 27, 2024 by 36 Comments

Android, the popular mobile phone OS, is essentially just Linux with a nice user interface layer covering it all up. In theory, it should be able to do anything a normal computer running Linux could do. And, since most web servers in the world are running Linux, [PelleMannen] figured his Android phone could run a web server just as well as any other Linux machine and built this webpage that’s currently running on a smartphone, with an additional Reddit post for a little more discussion.

The phone uses Termux (which we’ve written about briefly before) to get to a Bash shell on the Android system. Before that happens, though, some setup needs to take place largely involving installing F-Droid through which Termux can be installed. From there the standard SSH and Apache servers can be installed as if the phone were running a normal Linux The rest of the installation involves tricking the phone into thinking it’s a full-fledged computer including a number of considerations to keep the phone from halting execution when the screen locks and other phone-specific issues.

With everything up and running, [PelleMannen] reports that it runs surprisingly well with the small ARM system outputting almost no heat. Since the project page is being hosted on this phone we can’t guarantee that the link above works, though, and it might get a few too many requests to stay online. We wish it were a little easier to get our pocket-sized computers to behave in similar ways to our regular laptops and PCs (even if they don’t have quite the same amount of power) but if you’re dead-set on repurposing an old phone we’ve also seen them used to great effect in place of a Raspberry Pi.

Android-Powered Rigol Scopes Go Wireless

January 18, 2024 by 9 Comments

The Rigol DHO800 and DHO900 series use Android underneath, and as you might expect, this makes them easier to hack. A case in point: [VoltLog] demonstrates that you can add WiFi to the scope using a cheap USB WiFi adapter. This might seem like a no-brainer on the surface, but because the software doesn’t know about WiFi, there are a few minor hoops to jump through.

The first issue is that you need a WiFi adapter the built-in OS already knows how to handle. The community has identified at least one RTL chipset that works and it happens to be in the TP-Link TL-WN725N. These are old 2.4 GHz only units, so they are widely available for $10 or less.

But even with the correct hardware, the scope doesn’t have any menus to configure the WiFi interface. To solve that, you need to temporarily use a USB hub and a USB keyboard. Once you have everything plugged in, you can use the Super + N keyboard shortcut to open up the Android notification bar, which is normally hidden. Once you’ve setup the network connection, you won’t need the keyboard anymore.

Or maybe not — it turns out the keyboard does allow you to change a few other things. For example, [VoltLog] used it to increase the screen brightness more than the default maximum setting.

The only other issue appears to be that the scope shows it is disconnected even when connected to WiFi. That doesn’t seem to impact operation, though. Of course, you could use a WiFi to Ethernet bridge or even an old router, but now you have a cable, a box, and another power cord to deal with. This solution is neat and clean. You bet we’ve already ordered a TP-Link adapter!

WiFi scopes are nothing new. We suspect Rigol didn’t want to worry about interference and regulatory acceptance, but who knows? Besides, it is fun to add WiFi to wired devices.

Continue reading “Android-Powered Rigol Scopes Go Wireless” →

Android: Coming Soon To A RISC-V Processor Near You

November 1, 2023 by 7 Comments

In the roughly decade and a half since the Android mobile operating system appeared on the scene it has been primarily sold on devices with an ARM core at their heart, but along the way it has also appeared for other architectures. If you had a MIPS Android phone you may have been in the minority, but Intel phones enjoyed some popularity, and the up-and-coming new kid in the world of Android is RISC-V. For anyone interested in this last architecture it’s worth looking at the Google Open Source blog, in which they’ve published an overview of the current status of the project.

In short, it’s full steam ahead — as the development environment and emulation is in place for RISC-V Android. It’s certain we’ll start seeing RISC-V phones on the market soon, but perhaps that’s not the part which should interest readers the most. Over the last decade we have seen an explosion of inexpensive ARM single board computers, and though some of them such as the Raspberry Pi owe their heritage to set-top-box SoCs, it’s fair to say that a strong driver for this trend has been the proliferation of powerful mobile chips. A take-up of RISC-V driven by Android would mean a similar explosion of powerful SoCs with those  cores, leading we hope to much more accessible and powerful RISC-V computing. Sadly we expect them to still come with proprietary peripherals leading to plenty of closed source blobs, but we can’t have everything.

If you’d like to read more about the whole blob situation and RISC-V, we’ve got you covered.