Success, 1st steps

[Brian Beuken]

I've had such a pain getting the whole Android SDK to load, but after 2 days of installing,reinstalling, testing and trying...I finally got it in place

I tried it out 1st with an ancient Sony Experia Phone which I used to use when I was doing Playstation Mobile coding which was an NDK based form of Android. And it managed to build but was not happy with debugging or resending.

I next tried to create a project for my FriendlyArm K2, which is an android 5.1.1 based system with a decent CPU/GPUcombo I hooked it up the usual way to my network and monitor, but powered it via its usb to my PC giving me access to the Google USB driver to send and communicate. 

And lo and behold it worked, at least the VisualGDB simple NDK test project worked.. So it looks like I can build on that to produce some examples for Android based machines.
I've not even tried to do the OpenGLES stuff yet, just letting you all know that despite the hassle of getting the SDK for various versions of Android on to your system (we're talking many 10's of gigabytes). VisualGDB does seem to be fairly happy so far on later Android versions.

I'll take this a bit further and see how it gets on, my biggest issue at the moment is I can't seem to work out how to target a specific build chain after I've selected all versions, this makes the build quite slow. Though you can edit the Application.mk file which has
APP_ABI := all

to

APP_ABI := APP_ABI := armeabi-v7a

and that at least works for the K2 and speeds up the compile as it only builds once instead of about 8 versions.
Oh I just found the setting in makefile settings, under application ABI, you can tick on and off the different ones to find which works best for you

Download via usb is also not very fast but once its installed and running the debugger works and all seems to be fine. I'm now a little more hopeful that we can get somewhere with this for those who only have android based SBC's, like the K2