Day 1: Exploring #AndroidThings

Reporting on my first day of #FearlessCoding – for more about that see this post – and what I explored today..

So its 10:20 pm and I have a 4:00 am start so consider this a placeholder to be filled in with details on what I worked on today. With 2 hours of commute time tomorrow, I should be able to update this with more details.

Focus: Android Things

So I decided to focus on AndroidThings for my first fearless coding adventure. Two reasons why.

1. I am hosting the GDG NYC meetup tomorrow focused on this topic and this seems a good time to get my feet wet, given there will be a few experts and ideas around tomorrow, for me to kick things up a notch later this week.
2. I have always shied away from hardware. Its stupid but the reason is that software always felt more flexible and safe to work with. I lived in eternal fear of “bricking” my expensive hardware board or peripheral by doing something without understanding all the implications or knowing all the underpinning concepts. But that is exactly what fearless coding is meant to overcome right? Am I curious about this space? Check. Am I going to persist and keep going till I build something? Abso-betcha-lutely! And am I going to share my mistakes as I learn? I kinda think that will be the norm not the exception here :-)

Where I’m at:

1. AndroidThings exploration requires AndroidStudio and some dependencies installedas pre-requisities. I am currently running the updates on the background on this machine. I am already tearing my hear out as AndroidStudio spits out ominous messages about being unable to patch some things … hmmm.
2. AndroidThings exploration requires a compliant Developer Board and optional Peripheral Kits. I had purchased an Intel Edison board and peripherals kit earlier from Sparkfun, and have an AndroidThings-compliant kit using Raspberry Pi 3 from Adafruit. And then I happened to pick up an NXP Pico kit from IO 2017. So I am ready with that bit..

Hopefully the software installs will complete tonight and I can get to work on image downloads (to dev boards) and setting up for my first project tomorrow..

Till then .. bonne nuit ..