Migrating Eclipse ADT Android project to Android Studio

It’s been a couple of years since I’ve done any Android development. In the meantime I was aware that Android Studio was coming along, but apparently now Eclipse and the ADT plugins are no longer supported, so time to migrate source from some existing apps I was working on to Android Studio.

First issue: remove paths from .classpath and project.properties files otherwise ADT library references are not resolved on import.

Next issue: “Unsupported Gradle DSL method found: ‘compile()’!” – luckily this issue and the solution is described exactly here. This is my first experience with Gradle too, so got some more learning to do ๐Ÿ™‚

Game development for Android (attempt #3)

A while back (9 years it seems, see here) I had the urge to try and create a game in Java after having spent many years of Java development for business, but I’d never developed a game. It turned out OK (final version here), and along the way I abstracted a simple 2d game engine (here).

Inspired by one of the game development panels at Silicon Valley Comic Con last weekend, I’ve picked up a copy of  Android Game Development by Example by John Horton, and now off I go ๐Ÿ˜‰ I’ll report back in a couple of weeks…

Redirecting console output to a PiTFT screen

I just got a neat 3.8″ PiTFT from Adafruit. Followed the easy setup instructions in the tutorial and it seems I can either startx and get an X Windows desktop on the device, or display the tty1 console to the device on boot.

The trouble with the easy setup is it’s not clear what the scripts actually configured to get it working.

For X Windows, it seems this is the relevant part:

export FRAMEBUFFER=/dev/fb1

startx

 

For the console on boot, adding this section to the line in /boot/cmdline.txt following rootwait:

fbcon=map:10 fbcon=font:VGA8x8

The docs for fbcon here suggest that map:10 will map /dev/fb1 then /dev/fb0 in a repeating pattern across each tty, eg fb1 -> tty1, fb0 – > tty2, fb1 -> tty3 etc

The part I’m missing right now is how to switch the tty mappings on the fly, or how to map a specific ย console the to the buffer. This post I think is asking similar questions to what I’m trying to do.

If I want to map output on tty2 to the fb for the PiTFT, I wonder if it would be like this:

fbcon=map:01

I’ll try it and see…

Raspberry Pi with Adafruit PiTFT screen

Just followed the steps in the tutorial to get the modified kernel installed with support for Adafruit’s PiTFT and it all worked great.

What I’m going to be using it for is to monitor status output from Direwolf as it receives/sends packets, so will be running it in text mode, and ideally I want to get Direwolf and LinBPQ starting together at boot, and outputing to the console.

I’ve almost got the startup script working (following suggestions here), but I might take a look to see if I can redirect output to one of the virtual terminals and have that output to the screen (like discussed here). Some more things to take a look at ๐Ÿ™‚

fbtext – this might be useful too.