Book excerpt: The First Practical, Hands-On Guide to Embedded System Programming for Android Today, embedded systems programming is a more valuable discipline than ever, driven by fast-growing, new fields such as wearable technology and the Internet of Things. In this concise guide, Roger Ye teaches all the skills you’ll need to write the efficient embedded code necessary to make tomorrow’s Android devices work. The first title in Addison-Wesley’s new AndroidTM Deep Dive series for intermediate and expert Android developers, Embedded Programming with AndroidTM draws on Roger Ye’s extensive experience with advanced projects in telecommunications and mobile devices. Step by step, he guides you through building a system with all the key components Android hardware developers must deliver to manufacturing. By the time you’re done, you’ll have the key programming, compiler, and debugging skills you’ll need for real-world projects. First, Ye introduces the essentials of bare-metal programming: creating assembly language code that runs directly on hardware. Then, building on this knowledge, he shows how to use C to create hardware interfaces for booting a Linux kernel with the popular U-Boot bootloader. Finally, he walks you through using filesystem images to boot Android and learning to build customized ROMs to support any new Android device. Throughout, Ye provides extensive downloadable code you can run, explore, and adapt. You will Build a complete virtualized environment for embedded development Understand the workflow of a modern embedded systems project Develop assembly programs, create binary images, and load and run them in the Android emulator Learn what it takes to bring up a bootloader and operating system Move from assembler to C, and explore Android’s goldfish hardware interfaces Program serial ports, interrupt controllers, real time clocks, and NAND flash controllers Integrate C runtime libraries Support exception handling and timing Use U-Boot to boot the kernel via NOR or NAND flash processes Gain in-depth knowledge for porting U-Boot to new environments Integrate U-Boot and a Linux kernel into an AOSP and CyanogenMod source tree Create your own Android ROM on a virtual Android device