Building Embedded Systems with AOSP

Building Embedded Systems with AOSP

In our community, building embedded systems based on Linux, e.g. with Yocto or buildroot, is standard and well known. Considering Android, respectively the AOSP as a base system feels strange at the beginning as it is a huge ecosystem that implies high system requirements. Of course, embedded Android is not a solution for each issue. Nevertheless, the AOSP provides a sophisticated base platform which is packed with a

  • modern UI stack
  • robust media and camera implementation
  • modern AI runtime
  • well known abstraction between system and app development
  • energy optimization

and lots of other helpful infrastructure.
This makes AOSP an interesting approach for building more complex embedded systems.

A first goal of this talk is to show in which situations choosing AOSP over a plain Linux system really adds value and where not. But where to start and how are the best workflows? The AOSP is a massive and complex code base with a few hundred GB of source code. Navigating the sources, finding the right place to do changes and working with several code repositories at once is a tough task at the beginning. Thus, the second goal of this talk is to share best practices and hints to avoid lots of pitfalls from 8 years of doing embedded Android projects in different setups and sizes.

Presented at

  • inovex Meetup, Erlangen, 2023
  • Embedded Open Source Summit, Praha, 2023

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