I’ve made, tinkered and played around with hundreds of Android Projects in my mayhem “Android” days (early 2012 ~ mid 2015) on my beloved Nexus One before I finally had to let go of it. I loved (and still do) building Apps that mostly interacted wirelessly with Hardware (mostly Arduino) either through Bluetooth/WiFi.
Continue reading “Android/Hardware Integration Projects, et al”
I was wanting to buy a new Android device, now that my Nexus 1 is starting to show signs of old age 🙂
I wanted to buy the Nexus 6, but didn’t want to spend 48K on that device, given the fact that I’d be unemployed soon 🙂
A month back, this device, Huawei Honor Holly was introduced and I casually registered on Flipkart to notify me when it’s back in stock. I almost forgot it until one fine afternoon, I got an email saying that it’s back in stock. I just did some casual research about the device, found it cool for 7K and swapped my credit card 🙂 And the next day, this is what I had with me:
Unboxing it, it turned out to be an awesome treat!
I enjoyed this phone. Some important specs that drew me to this device include 16GB of internal storage, 5″ HD IPS Screen, 1080p Video Recording through a 8Mp Cam and Android 4.4.2. The build quality is also pretty impressive and so is the Battery. I even connected it to Android Studio and uploaded one of my Android apps and it works sleak.
I call this device, the poor Man’s Nexus 6 🙂
Also, since the chipset is based on the same one as found on Android One Devices, I’m hopeful we can expect upgrades to upcoming Android OSes either from the OEM themselves or through custom ROMs.
I’m glad that I got this device 🙂
The journey of repairing my Nexus One began here. I saw this cute little cover for my Nexus One and shared it on G+:
And then since I didn’t really have a 3D printer, I decided to buy new clothes for my phone and grabbed this one off Amazon:
48 hours later, 25th Nov, I had this case in my hand. Now, here’s the fun part: I wanted to wipe clean my phone before I clothed him with this new case. I soaked a piece of cloth to clean, rubbed it against the soap and now rigorously started cleansing the phone with all energy and enthusiasm and thoughts of now showing off my cool phone cased 🙂
Clean… clean…top… clean… bottom… clean and dunk!!! The phone falls from my hand, falls face flat with the screen flatly hitting the floor and in a split second, 1/3 of the right screen now shows a dull white line. I pick up, test the touch and it’s working fine. I console myself saying that “Never mind, I atleast have 2/3 of the screen real-estate to myself”, feel little sad, curl the N1 next to me and sleep off.
I wake up in the morning to see that the 1/3 area has now encroached over 1/2 of the area. I’m glad that atleast I can answer calls. As the day passes, guess what, the entire land ( 😛 ) has been taken over by the invading army and I’m left with a black dark screen!
What next? Post about it:
(I think someone’s evil eye got jealous of my N1 with KK and they “Nazar lagadiye mere phone ko and phone Baigan mein mil gaya”
First things first, I disassemble the phone by following the youtube video here:
Now, the search for the Samsung AMOLED 60H00287-009 screen begins. Gets hit up by one on eBay India, but it looks costly at 1800 bucks. Finds a cheaper one on Amazon.com here:
Excited, checks out the screen, only to be dismayed that they don’t ship to India.
I sulk, sulk again and again and toss it over in a box to buy the 1800 Rs one once I savor enough cash.
3 weeks pass by and I realize how comfortably I can stay off off WhatsApp and a Smartphone. I take to Twitter on my PC, get more involved in other stuff. Life goes on…Unless…
A need is born, a need to test an Embedded prototype project that takes in commands from an Android app over Bluetooth. Now, I can’t restrain myself any further. I call the eBay shop owner selling the screen and he says that I can get a better price if I visit his online store at http://mobispares.com.
I find my LCD screen here:
I proceed to the payment gateway and it fails there (insufficient balance 😛 ). I sulk again!
I wait, I call over the Store Owner (Mr. Javeed) and tell that I’ll be purchasing this soon. He’s a very well mannered person and I like very much the way he responds saying, “Sure Sir, anytime, We’re here to help you.” Awesome friendly service. Thanks Javeed bhai, you’re amazing.
I finally place the order on 5th November and now the wait begins:
I keep telling my Mom that I’m expecting an order. I again remind her before I leave for office. I call her again to see if it arrived. No.
Next day, it’s Thursday and no delivery yet. Nps, patience is sweeter!
Friday: I’m at Office, Mom calls me up at 6 and says “Hey, you’ve received a courier”. My heart starts thumping, I excitedly ask her “Is it from Mobispares” and she’s like “Yeah!” and my heart almost skips a beat. I tell her excitedly “Cool, thanks, Bye” and now I concentrate 100% on my Job with the newfound energy of rushing back home and fixing it. The next 3 hours feel like 3 days. At 9:30, I join Ahmed and we drive back home. The first thing I do while reaching home is open up the courier and smile, smile again and smile 🙂
I’m also a little tensed, what if my phone will not accept this? What if any one single connection fails? Many What ifs… I hurriedly have my Dinner, offer my Isha Namaz and sit on my table having cleared off everything except the phone screen and a tooth brush:
You may wonder why the tooth brush is for 😛
Next comes the screwdriver set:
And then, the entire Nexus One (in bits and pieces):
The time is now 22:50 and I begin assembling the new screen using this video:
Takes me 30 Minutes to get it assembled. At 23:20, after asking Allah to make this work, I switch on my phone!!! And Alhamdulillah, first boot screen comes up:
Yay!!! 30 seconds later:
Coming back to where the story started: the new case cover. I now go and clean the jelly case that has gathered dust over time and now, carefully (and with love) embody the phone into the case
And this is how I look now:
As they say, “All’s well that ends well”. I spend the next 1.5 hours and doze off at 02:00.
Sincere thanks to http://www.DirectFix.com, Javeed Bhai (MobiSpares.com), Dad and Mom 🙂
P.S: I’ll share some screenshots of the awesome new theme I installed on this device 🙂
Though I’ve been tinkering with Android apps for over 2+ years, I never published them on the play store. I just felt that who’d ever bother downloading my crazy, dsyfunctional apps 😛
But then I wanted to learn the process of having an app in the store and here it is: 
I earlier also open sourced all my Android Apps and you can grab the repo here: https://bitbucket.org/anwaarullah/android/src Enjoy 🙂
As we’re talking here, it’s worthwhile to mention that Android Lollipop has just been released and today the SDK Images for development have also arrived.
Awesome!!!
trevd just released his work on porting Android 4.4.4 to the Raspberry Pi. He wrote an elaborate post on the XDA forum here detailing the kinky features of what he’s done.
Instructions for getting started can be found on his github repository.
I’ll try this out myself and hopefully let you guys know how it goes! This is super exciting for me 🙂
[tag Raspberry Pi, Android]
I happened to present a talk at the Google Dev Fest Hyderabad that took place this Saturday, 5th October, 2013.
I’ve uploaded the slide decks used and also the code used in the demo. Please find them below. If you need any help on implementing these, please reach out to me.
The source code is uploaded here:
https://bitbucket.org/anwaarullah/chromearduino
A small video:
Cheers!!!
Came across this cool USB stick that allows you to connect to and control many devices from your smartphone.
One of the cool features is that it’s Arduino compatible 🙂
More info at this link (also from where I copied the above info 🙂 ):
http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/babuino-connecting-smartphones-to-digital-devices
Cheers!
This was a small presentation I gave at the Open Source India 2012 Conference in Bangalore, India.
Though it’s been months now, I’d like to share it here so that I don’t lose out my link 🙂 This video can’t be embedded right here as it’s protected. So, enjoy the direct link:
Modified Now.
After spending days and more than 11 hours straight today, we’ve finally got Android talking with Arduino via WiFi using the cute little RN XV WiFi module. What was considered to be a mountain turned out to be a molehill. The funny part is that this now looks more easier than the Bluetooth communication which I’m comfortable with. What we’re doing here is connecting the Arduino to an Android device which is configured as a HotSpot (a very cool Android feature from ver 2.2 onwards). Snapshot:
I’ll be explaining in detail all steps, configurations and code in my next post since I’m very tired now having worked the entire day getting this working. It’s 2:30 A.M 🙂 Good Night
Syed Anwaarullah 