Manually flash Android Things

To flash Android Things onto your board, download the latest system image in the Android Things Console (see the release notes) and follow these steps:

  1. Download and install Android Studio or the sdkmanager command-line tool. Update the Android SDK Platform Tools to version 25.0.3 or later from the SDK Manager.

    • Navigate to the Android SDK location on your computer; the path can be found in the system settings for Android Studio. Verify that the fastboot binary is installed in the platform-tools/ directory.

    • After you verify platform-tools/, add it to your PATH environment variable. This command should be similar to the following:

      export PATH="path/to/platform-tools":$PATH

  2. Open a command line terminal and navigate to the unzipped image directory.

  3. Verify that the device has booted into Fastboot mode by executing the following command:

    $ fastboot devices
1b2f21d4e1fe0129    fastboot

  4. Execute the flash-all.sh script. This script installs the necessary bootloader, baseband firmware(s), and operating system. (On Windows systems, use flash-all.bat instead).

  5. To verify that Android is running on the device, discover it using the adb tool:

    $ adb wait-for-device
...
$ adb devices
List of devices attached
1b2f21d4e1fe0129    device