Getting Started

The Getting Started page is the entry point allowing you to experience an Android4SAM demo on your SAM9 Evaluation Kit. We also provide pages which describe the components involved in the demo and explain how to build them from source code.

Android Introduction

What Is Android

Android is an operating system for portable devices such as smartphone and tablet computer. It is developed by the Open Handset Alliance led by Google. It is a competitor to the Symbian platform, Apple's iOS for the iPhone and Microsoft's Windows Mobile for mobile devices.

Technologically, Android includes libraries, middleware, key applications and a modified Linux kernel. It was initially developed by Android Inc., a firm later purchased by Google, and lately by the Open Handset Alliance. It allows developers to write managed code in Java language, controlling the device with the support of Google-developed Java libraries.

The Android operating system software stack consists of Java applications running on a Java based object oriented application framework on top of Java core libraries running on a Dalvik virtual machine featuring JIT compilation. Libraries written in C include the surface manager, media framework, SQLite relational database management system, OpenGL ES 2.0 3D graphics API, WebKit layout engine, SGL graphics engine, SSL, and Bionic libc.

The Android operating system consists of 12 million lines of code including 3 million lines of XML, 2.8 million lines of C, and 2.1 million lines of Java. The unveiling of the Android distribution on 5 November 2007 was announced with the founding of the Open Handset Alliance, a consortium of 71 hardware, software, and telecom companies devoted to advancing open standards for mobile devices. Google released most of the Android code under the Apache License, a free software and open source license.

Reference Links

• Android Official Website
• Android Developer’s Guide – SDK
• Android Project Source Repository
• ATMEL’s Linux4SAM WIKI Page

Android4SAM Introduction

This page is a starting point of the Android4SAM which offers and allows you to easily get a running embedded Android on AT91 products.

This page also describes how an Android4SAM system boots and how binaries are installed in FLASH memories. For each topic a more detailed section exists with in-depth description, valuable web links, source code and steps of how to build.

Click on the image up above to select a topic.

Android4SAM NandFlash & SD Card Demo - Memory Map

Starting Android4SAM

More help needed

If you need more help, here are some suggestions:

Embest offers support for more applications verified working well in Android4SAM demo. Click Embest to get full featured Android customization and value added services, including: Android based reference designs Android application development Android related trainings To get complete support from Embest, click Embest LOGO,or contact: sales.en@embedinfo.com.

See also: AndroidRootfs