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Andrew Henderson

Welcome to BBBAndroid!

BBBAndroid is a base image of the Android OS for the BeagleBone Black ARM-based single board computer. It is an extension of the Rowboat project with a focus on purely the BeagleBone Black. The key difference between BBBAndroid and Rowboat is that BBBAndroid uses a Linux 3.8 kernel and Rowboat uses a Linux 3.2 kernel. The different kernel gives you a few advantages:

  • Full cape manager support (dynamic loading of device tree overlays)
  • Video resolutions can be automatically determined for LCD capes and the BBB's HDMI video, allowing for a wide variety of capes to be supported
  • Generally, if a driver or cape works under the official BBB Linux distribution images, it can be expected to work under BBBAndroid

Together, these advantages will allow you to do your heavy driver development under Linux and then easily transition that work over to Android. Because the binary blob hardware-accelerated OpenGL ES drivers are unavailable for the Linux 3.8 kernel, you won't be able to produce a production-ready Android product using the kernel. For hobbyists, hardware developers, students, and Android app developers, though, BBBAndroid serves as an excellent testbed platform for trying new things.

Getting Started:

Go to the the project web page at http://www.bbbandroid.org to:

  • Download and install a pre-made image
  • Fetch the sources and build your own image
  • Learn how to customize your image

Project Members: