Android

Android is an operating system made by Google. Originally designed for mobile phones, it now runs on tablets, set-up boxes, television, and the CuBox-i.

Android is also one of the default operating system on the SD card, when an SD card is ordered with a CuBox-i. Originally based on Android 4.3, the current version of Android on CuBox-i is 4.4.2.

Install using Ignition: Android can be installed using the Ignition installer. Flash Ignition to an SD card, then use Ignition to download and install Android automatically.

Using a disk image

1. Download the disk image: Download Link.
2. Extract it using a zip program.
3. Flash the image to an SD card.

Using the installation script (Linux only)

1. Download the installation file [2]. There are two versions available
2. - Open source Android, with only the default applications
3. - With Google apps (gapps) included (Play store, YouTube, Gmail, Maps, etc)
4. Run the script as root (replace mmcblk0 with the correct device)

  ./create-sdcard -f /dev/mmcblk0 

The default of the images is 720p with 64MByte of memory allocated to the GPU. This configuration is intended to get the best experience of the CuBox-i1.

If you want to change the resolution to 1080p then you can do the following:

1. Take the SD card out of the CuBox-i and insert it into your PC
2. The boot partition will mount
3. Open the file uEnv.txt in a text editor
4. Change resolution=1280x720M@60 to the desired resolution
5. Safely remove the SD card / Unmount the SD card
6. Place it back into the CuBox-i and boot

An experimental recovery image is included in the Android installation. This recovery is based on ClockWork Mod (CWM). Using recovery, you can backup and restore the Android image, format drives, or install additional packages. Both SuperSU for rooting, and Google Applications can be installed using recovery.

Booting recovery

1. Take the SD card out of the CuBox-i and insert it into your PC
2. The boot partition will mount
3. Open the file uEnv.txt in a text editor
4. Change ramdisk.img to cwm.img
5. Safely remove the SD card / Unmount the SD card
6. Place it back into the CuBox-i and boot

Restoring normal boot To restore the normal boot, follow the same instructions, and change cwm.img back to ramdisk.img

You can root Android and install SuperSU. This allows you to write to the complete file system from within Android, and to run app that need root access. First download SuperSU using Android. Then use recovery to install it. From the recovery menu, choose Install zip, and browse to the download directory (or where SuperSU.zip is stored). Confirm to install SuperSU.

All Source-Code is available on Github. Please have a look here: Forum-Link

Android does not support AP-Mode. If you want to use external wifi/bt adapters, you need to recompile the kernel with the drivers you need.

CuBox-i has two USB hosts on it's back; due to that ADB over USB is not an easy option.

The easiest way to obtain ADB access is over network (tcp/ip based).

NOTE: The Android OS has to be rooted!

The process is as follows -

• Open Serial console to the CuBox-i (via the micro USB connector or wire directly to the uart interface in case it's CuBox-i1 / i2)
• Copy your ~/.android/adbkey.pub from your Linux PC to the CuBox-i /data/misc/adb/adb_keys. For example

On your Linux PC --> cat ~/.android/adbkey.pub
On CuBox-i --> echo "<cut and paste the above key>" > /data/misc/adb/adb_keys

• Set ADB daemon to run from the network and to listen to port 5555 by running the following on your CuBox-i serial console -

 setprop service.adb.tcp.port 5555
 setprop ro.adb.secure 0
 stop adbd
 sleep 1
 start adbd

Now enable Android debugging mode on CuBox-i and then USB debugging Connect your Linux PC adb to CuBox-i

adb connect <CuBox-i IP address>:5555

• A popup on the Android main menu should appear asking for confirmation. Notice that if this doesn't appear then something went wrong.
• To confirm that adb is connected properly, run the following and you should be seeing CuBox-i as an active device -

 adb devices