p.bellagente - March 9, 2018
This project concerns the realization of a framework, called SAndroidE (Sensors for Android Embedded), which is intended to facilitate the realization of Android Apps exploiting resources (sensors/actuators) located externally from the smart device. The framework allows developers to handle external resources in the same way of embedded ones, without taking care of data exchange aspects. SAndroidE can be used with any smart device supporting Android OS. The library role is to “virtualize” the external sensors/actuators in such a way that they are available and can be managed in Android environment as if they were embedded resources. In that way, the same functions and callbacks usually employed to handle embedded sensors (e.g., accelerometer) and actuators (e.g., vibrating alert) can be used to operate with external resources, thus facilitating the interface with remote nodes and the App development. To accomplish this task, the library takes advantage of XML files, called “Descriptors”, which carry information related to the remote nodes’ hardware as well as to the adopted communication technologies. Remote nodes can embed more than a sensor/actuator, thus it is important to detail each resource following specific guidelines (available soon). A node Descriptor should be provided along with the corresponding firmware. The latter could be as simple as possible, being its main tasks the resources’ handling (reading the sensors/writing the actuators) and the communication management. Indeed, the “smartness” of the system is located in the Android App. With this approach, external nodes are interchangeable and can easily cooperate, thus increasing the system scalability and versatility.
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