Professional Android Open Accessory Programming with Arduino

Chapter 6

Using Your Accessory Library

WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Using custom Android libraries
• Foreground versus background processes
• Custom Android UI widgets
• Building the mini projects

WROX.COM CODE DOWNLOADS FOR THIS CHAPTER

The wrox.com code downloads for this chapter are found at www.wrox.com/remtitle.cgi?isbn=1118454766 on the Download Code tab. The code is in the Chapter 6 download and individually named according to the names throughout the chapter.

In this chapter you familiarize yourself in more detail with the Android Open Accessory (AOA) framework and what it means to use accessories in your apps; in particular, all the different steps you need to take to use accessories in your app and the different things you need to think about.

In this chapter you also use the WroxAccessories library that you developed in Chapter 5 to build four accessory-enabled apps for the mini projects introduced in Chapters 7 and 8. Using your library implies understanding how to add custom libraries to your application, so you’ll start off by exploring what a library is from the point of view of the Android application.

USING CUSTOM ANDROID LIBRARIES

You’ve already used Android libraries in your project; in fact, the Android SDK itself is a library! You can find the Android library inside any Android project. If you’re using the latest SDK (at the time of writing this was Android SDK 16, or 4.1), you can see it in the subfolder called “Android 4.1” in your Android project. The Android library ...