Anyone do any Android development?

[Chris1712]

Evening gents, I'm planning on doing my on board diagnostics reader etc. for my final year Uni project.

I had originally planned to do it for a little embedded device like something based around the OMAP 3530 or similiar. But, I've just got myself an HTC Desire running google's lovely Android OS so now I'm pondering about making it for that instead.

My main concerns are having to deal with a clunky SDK (I'm used to a text editor and gcc ) having to be more stringent with different modules (using googles API's and stuff) and also having to deal with Java *shudder*.

Really all I need to do is read data from a RS232 style UART, which I gather I could do with a bluetooth COM port. But do I end up having a nasty bloated program dealing with androids way of talking to stuff etc.? I'm used to C programming and the looks of Java and the associated overheads just look like an overwhelming pain in the backside to me.

So yeah, anyone do it? Recommend some good books or is Google's documentation good enough? Any books to recommend for both Android and Java? By that I mean an Android dev book without the assumed knowledge of Java.

 

[_TubbZ_]

On a Final year project front i would say find something for a real business as you just automatically seem to get better marks if its a real world product. Did you do a placement year? If so they may want you to do something for them.

If you would like to stick to your android app tho, you've got the phone, spend a few hours seeing if what you would like to attempt is feasible and by the sounds of it if you can face using Java! If you really don't like the idea of all Java then there is a Native Dev Kit: http://developer.android.com/sdk/ndk/index.html (no idea about it tho) so you could possibly do as much as possible in C.

If you have no knowledge of how to use Objects other people have been recommending: http://www.bluej.org/objects-first/ with the BlueJ IDE.

I can't recommend you a book on Android development, but the documentation seems rather well written when i looked into developing something myself (no time ) And the eclipse plugin seems awesome (along with Eclipse)!

 

[Chris1712]

On a Final year project front i would say find something for a real business as you just automatically seem to get better marks if its a real world product. Did you do a placement year? If so they may want you to do something for them.

If you would like to stick to your android app tho, you've got the phone, spend a few hours seeing if what you would like to attempt is feasible and by the sounds of it if you can face using Java! If you really don't like the idea of all Java then there is a Native Dev Kit: http://developer.android.com/sdk/ndk/index.html (no idea about it tho) so you could possibly do as much as possible in C.

If you have no knowledge of how to use Objects other people have been recommending: http://www.bluej.org/objects-first/ with the BlueJ IDE.

I can't recommend you a book on Android development, but the documentation seems rather well written when i looked into developing something myself (no time ) And the eclipse plugin seems awesome (along with Eclipse)!

From talking with my tutors a 'product' is not of great importance to them it seems. Just something interesting and new to yourself is good enough. Ultimately though It could be a product, in car OBD is a pretty competitive market though but their isn't really a brilliant android app yet.

That NDK malarkey looks interesting, will have a read. I'm thinking maybe learning Java and android stuff might be a bit too much, the last thing I want is to make no progress at all because I've over burdened myself. Maybe an embedded system and some C/ASM would be easier.

EDIT: I am currently on my placement year, but anything I could do related to it would be way beyond the scope of something I could actually achieve I think. I'm working at Broadcom working on cable and satellite set top boxes, unless they decided to let me have a reference platform and access to their low level porting interface and then the mid level API on top of that I couldn't really do a lot!