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Raspberry basics: Project 30a

Project name: Raspberry PI 3 model B board - How to install Android on your Raspberry Pi?

Tags: Raspberry, Raspberry PI 3 model B board, vers 1.1, v 1.1, How to install Android on your Raspberry Pi, Android and Raspberry Pi, Google Play Store, Emteria OS, Android 7.1.2

Attachments: None

In this project, you needed these parts (Dear visitors. You can support our project buy clicking on the links of parts and buying them or donate us to keep this website alive. Thank you):

1.Raspberry PI 3 model B or B+ 1 pc

2. Micro SD card with NOOBS and SD card adapter 1 pc

3. Micro USB power supply (2.1 A, max 2.5 A) 1 pc

4. USB keyboard 1 pc

5. USB mouse 1 pc

6. TV or PC monitor 1 pc

7. HDMI cable 1 pc

General

We will learn how to install Android 7.1.2 on Raspberry Pi.

Android in its early days ran great on low spec phones and tablets. Raspberry Pi 3 devices today are much more powerful than these Android devices. So, you may be thinking of trying out Android on your Raspberry Pi 3 devices. 

We can install Android 7.1.2 on Raspberry Pi 3 with assistance of Emteria OS in this project.

How I can use Android?

• Smart TV. You can use Android on your TV to watch movies with streaming providers or even local files.
• Cheap tablet. You can add a screen on your Raspberry Pi and make a custom tablet for a low budget. We would recommend you to take a Personal license for Emteria, to avoid reboots and pop-ups.
• Frame. You can use it to display photos, presentations or anything else continuously. We suggest a touch-sensitive display for that.

Android Apps on Google Play Store

• Movie streaming providers. You can use the search or goto Home -> Categories -> Entertainment and you’ll see  all movie providers are available in the Play Store. You can install YouTube, Netflix, Amazon Video, Twitch or any other big media services from here.
• Movie players. If you want to watch your own movies files - use VLC.
• Music streaming providers. In the music & audio category you’ll find Spotify or Amazon Music.
• Music players. You can also use an app like AIMP to enjoy local music files.
• Photo frame. For a photo slideshow you can use Pixgram or Dayframe. You can also use Microsoft Powerpoint to display a text, graphs and photos for professional slideshows.
• General apps. You can also install general apps as they are not available by default - Google Chrome, Google Maps and so on.

How to transfer files to the Android device?

There are two methods to do this:

1. You can format an empty USB stick in FAT32, put files on it and use it on your Android device. Either directly from the USB storage (you’ll have a message in the notification panel) or by copying files to the SD card (you have a copy/paste option in the file explorer).
2. You can put files on a website and download them later or use apps like Dropbox to share files on your Raspberry Pi.
3. You can download and install apps like VNC or Teamviewer to take control of the Android device from anywhere. On the latest Emteria version VNC is built-in in the settings, you just need to enable it.

What is Emteria?

Emteria is a young company from Germany.

Since September 2017 they build Android releases for industrial applications and products. Emteria target is mainly companies with specific needs about Android. Emteria offers a reliable operating system with a long-term support for their products. emteria.OS compatible with Raspberry Pi 3 B/B+ versions and Emteria offers a development service to build an image for your specific devices.

Emteria offers the emteria.OS, a free evaluation of Android for personal users. The free evaluation has no time limitation, but the emteria.OS will reboot after 8 hours. You will have less advanced features and no support, but you don’t need this. If you want to get more features and stop the reboot, you have to pay 19 Euro per device for a Personal license.

The emteria.OS is released in form of multiple separate packages, which have to be combined on the storage of the target device (e.g. sdcard for a Raspberry Pi). For your convenience, Emteria provides a graphical installer for emteria.OS, which can be executed on your PC or laptop and performs all required steps automatically.

Attention: do not download this program directly to your target device, but use your PC or laptop instead to prepare the storage! Installer currently does not work on Windows 10. Please use Widows 7.

Space requirements

As mentioned above, emteria.OS consists of multiple separate packages, which are automatically downloaded and installed to your sdcard or the device’s internal memory. The size of those packages can vary depending on the device and emteria.OS version. The installer will use the full data storage and partition it accordingly. Here is an example of approximate partition sizes created by emteria. For example OS 0.5.7 on an 8 GB sdcard for Raspberry Pi 3 (these values may change in future releases):

Partition Size Comment

• boot 64 MB Chosen to be as small as reasonably possible
• system 2.1 GB System data and reserved space of about 1 GB each
• oem 0.6 GB Space for pre-installed business extensions
• data 5.2 GB Automatically sized partition to fill the remaining space

Supported Hardware

Screens

All standard HDMI screens should be supported. Please see the section below for more information about the supported resolutions. The majority of USB-based touch controllers should also work out-of-the box. Following screens have been successfully tested by us with emteria.OS 0.5.x:

52Pi 5" touchscreen: The 800x480 capacitive HDMI touchscreen with USB controller for multi-touch.

Raspberry Pi 7" touchscreen: The official Raspberry Pi 7″ touch screen display with 10 finger capacitive touch.

Waveshare 7" touchscreen: A capacitive HDMI screen with an USB touch controller.

Waveshare 10.1" touchscreen: A capacitive HDMI screen with an USB touch controller.

Audio

The audio jack is used as the default audio out. If it doesn’t work in your setup, or if you wish to change the default behavior, please refer to HDMI_FORCE_EDID_AUDIO and HDMI_IGNORE_EDID_AUDIO options as specified by the Raspberry official documentation. The emteria.OS also has built-in support for USB speaker and USB microphone without additional configuration.

Camera

Built-in support for the Official CSI Camera Module without additional configuration.

GPIO

Accessing GPIO is possible just the same way you would do it in Linux (via sysfs). We are also planning on adding proper Java API for that, but it will take a while.

GPS

Built-in support for ODROID’s USB GPS Module without additional configuration.

NFC

Built-in support for NXP’s USB NFC Dongle without additional configuration.

Understanding the Raspberry PI 3 model B

The Raspberry Pi 3 is the third-generation Raspberry Pi. It replaced the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B in February 2016.

Specification:

• Quad Core 1.2GHz Broadcom BCM2837 64bit CPU
• 1GB RAM
• BCM43438 wireless LAN and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) on board
• 40-pin extended GPIO
• 4 USB 2 ports
• 4 Pole stereo output and composite video port
• Full size HDMI
• CSI camera port for connecting a Raspberry Pi camera
• DSI display port for connecting a Raspberry Pi touchscreen display
• Micro SD port for loading your operating system and storing data
• Upgraded switched Micro USB power source up to 2.5A

Signals and connections of the Raspberry PI 3 model B

Step by Step instruction

Attention: Please use a card of at least speed class 10 or higher (UHS), since the read/write speed of the sdcard will heavily influence the system speed. Best results are achieved by using cards of type A1. Some cards are known to not work correctly with the Raspberry Pi. Please check this comprehensive list for your specific SD card.

We assume that you have Windows 7 installed on your PC and empty micro SD card with SD card adapter.

1. Installing installer for emteria.OS

1. Insert Micro SD card to SD card adapter.
2. Insert SD card adapter to your SD card reader in your PC or connect external SD card reader to PC/laptop USB port.
3. Go to emteria.com website and register to create your account. You will need provide your email address and click on Register button.
4. You will get an email from Emteria to confirm the email address. Click on the link provided.
5. 
   
6. You will need to complete the Registration - enter your password and other details.
7. 
   
8. Click on Finish Registration button. Click on link Use our emteria.OS installer to download and flash the latest release of emteria.OS.
9. 
10. Download the installer application by choosing the operating system of your PC or laptop. Wait for the download to complete, the file Emteria.OS_Installer-v0.6-16.exe will be downloaded into the Download folder of your PC or laptop (We are using Windows 7).
11. 
12. Installation process is quite simple. You will need 84.4 MB space on your hard drive for that.
13. 
    

2. Installing the emteria.OS

1. Start Emteria installer on your PC or laptop.
2. 
3. You will need to type your email address and password. Click on Login button.
4. Choose your device in the list and the version (the latest version is 0.6.4) you want to install. Click on Continue button.
5. 
6. Make sure your target data storage or the corresponding internal memory is properly connected to your computer. Choosing one of the listed drives will start the installation. Warning: all data on this sdcard will be lost!
7. 
8. Click on Flash button and OK button.
9. 
10. Wait for the download and installation process to complete and click on Quit install button to close the installer.
11. 

3. Booting the Emteria OS first time

1. Make sure that Raspberry PI 3 switched off.
2. When the installer finishes, take the Micro SD card out and insert the Micro SD card with image to your Raspberry Pi 3 board.
3. Connect Raspberry PI 3 board HDMI port and to your TV or Monitor HDMI port with HDMI cable.
4. Connect an Ethernet cable to LAN' port of Raspberry Pi 3 board.
5. Make sure that your monitor or TV is turned on, and that you have selected the right input (e.g. HDMI 1,  etc).
6. Plug in your USB mouse and USB keyboard to Raspberry PI 3 USB ports.
7. Connect Micro USB power supply to Raspberry PI 3 board micro USB input.
8. You should see a short text boot sequence followed by the emteria logo animation. 
9. 
10. 
11. It can take a few minutes while the Emteria OS finishs the installation process. Then, you’ll get an installation wizard and you have some information to give.
12. Click on Next to start the wizard. Choose your language in the list. 
13. 
14. Adjust the date & time settings if needed. Set the wireless connection if you don’t have ethernet available - turn the WiFi On and choose your network in the list, enter the password.
15. Click on Next and it will ask your for a Device Activation. As we are using the Evaluation version, we don’t have any license to use. If you bought the Personal version, you need to login in this form. 
16. Click on Next to continue. Accept the license agreement and reboot the system.
17. The Raspberry Pi will now reboot, and after a few seconds, you’ll get the Android Desktop on your screen.
18. 
19. You can use the F-Droid app to install other apps on Emteria OS. You will notice that not all Android apps are available on it. So, how I can get them? You need to install the Google Play Store. See the tips below.

4. Installing and using Google Play Store 

1. We will use the Open Gapps project. It is an open-source solution to install Google Apps on custom Android devices. It supports any device and android version.
2. 
3. To install the Open Gapps app go to the web browser on Emteria OS. Enter the website URL: https://opengapps.org and press Enter button on USB keyboard.
4. Open the navigation menu in the top left corner. Then click on Download the app. 
5. In the new page, click on Download.
6. 
7. A file download starts on android, you can follow it by swiping the top of the screen. At the end of the download click on the notification to open the file. A pop-up window will ask you to install the app.
8. At the end of the installation you’ll get a few questions to configure the app
   You need to give it all the permissions asked
   The next steps are to choose the Open Gapps version you want on Emteria
   You need to select:
   Architecture: ARM (auto selected)
   Android version: 7.1 (or the auto selected one if  you have a more recent version)
   Gapps version: pico
   Each gapps version contains a different set of  Google applications
   For the Raspberry Pi you can’t choose another one if you don’t want to get extreme lags
   The pico version only contains the Google Play Store and it’s the only thing we need for the moment
   At the end of the installation you’ll get a few questions to configure the app. You need to give it all the permissions asked.
9. The next steps are to choose the Open Gapps version you want on Emteria OS. Select:
   Architecture: ARM (auto selected), Android version: 7.1 (or the auto selected one if  you have a more recent version), Gapps version: full or pico. Each gapps version contains a different set of  Google applications. The pico version only contains the Google Play Store. 
10. Click on Download (red link). The download starts and you need to wait a few minutes (depending on your Internet connection speed). At the end of the download, you’ll get something like this in the same window:
11. 
12. Click on Install (red link). Confirm the installation in the pop-up. Your Raspberry Pi will reboot into recovery mode to install the package. The installation is automatic. 
13. 
14. Once the installation is done, the system will reboot into the normal system mode. On the first boot, you can see the Google Play Store app in the apps menu.
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16. 
17. Click on Play Store app. Enter your Gmail account credentials and wait a few seconds. Accept the user agreement and access the Google Play catalog. Look for your app, download and install.
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19. You can get the "System optimization in progress, please wait … Please note that the system may be very slow until the optimization process finishes. Multiple reboots may be required before all components are ready". It takes at least 30 minutes to complete and you have to do it several times until it works correctly.
20. If you plug your Raspberry Pi camera before the system boot, you can use it in the Camera app. We took several photos and it was working well.
21. You can also try Video app if it's not working then look for other app on Google play.

Summary

We have learnt how to install Android 7 OS on Raspberry Pi.

The Android 7 OS on Raspberry Pi is a great way to get everything you want on it, as most of the top web services are available in the Google Play Store (Netflix, YouTube, Microsoft Office and much more).

There are some negative aspects: 

• optimization of the system screen (black screen with text) is comming from time to time,
• it's very slow when you use WiFi or have slow internet connection, 
• if you use the emteria.OS free evaluation  - the system will reboot after 8 hours of use and pops up window, which is informing about that, is coming from time to time.You will have less advanced features and no support, but you don’t need this. If you want to get more features and stop the reboot, you have to pay 19 Euro per device for a Personal license
• you can use Raspberry Pi 3 B/B+ versions only.

Can I access the Raspberry Pi from a remote computer? You can download and install apps like VNC or Teamviewer to take control of the Android device from anywhere. On the latest Emteria OS version VNC is built-in in the settings, you just need to enable it.

Can I use camera, GPS, Phone, NFC or any other accessory on my Raspberry Pi with Emteria OS?  There ara built-in support for the Official CSI Camera module, ODROID’s USB GPS module, NXP’s USB NFC Dongle without additional configuration. For the other accessories it's should be possible with some specific hardware. You can check this knowledge database page from the official Emteria website to get information on that. You can also ask your questions in the discussion forum for additional advises. 

Libraries in use

• None

Script

• None