obey!

Command your shiny Android in Python

I am the happy owner of an Android phone. I love it. But what I love even more, is rolling some sweet Python on my precious.

In case you have a vanilla phone like I do, you will need to follow these steps:

  • download and install the Android SDK for your platform
  • add the SDK tools to your system path, for instance on Windows run this in a shell:
> set PATH=%PATH%;path_to_android_sdk\tools
  • activate USB debugging on your phone (Parameters > Applications > Development > USB Debugging)
  • setup your system to detect your device as explained here (on Windows, it means installing the usb driver from the SDK)
  • check that your phone is detected correctly by running adb get-state (if everything is ok, the result should be ‘device’)
  • check out the Android Scripting Environment svn repository on your computer (see this page)

Your system is almost configured, let’s install the necessary applications on the phone:

  • install the Android Scripting Environment on your phone
  • (optionally) install the Text-to-Speech library (by Charles Chen) on your phone if you want to use it in your scripts, via the Android Market
  • run ASE on your phone, type menu and start a Python shell, you will notice a line like ‘export AP_PORT = “49508”‘.
  • setup port forwarding on your system with the value you just noted:
> set AP_PORT=49508
> adb forward tcp:%AP_PORT% tcp:%AP_PORT%
  • go to the ASE directory on your computer containing the android.py module
> cd path_to_ASE\python\ase
  • run your favorite Python 2.6 interpreter and enjoy the magic:
> python
Python 2.6 (r26:66721, Oct  2 2008, 11:35:03) [MSC v.1500 32 bit (Intel)] on win32
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import android
>>> droid = android.Android()
# now your phone is ready to acknowledge your awesomeness
>>> droid.speak('hello, my master')
{u'result': None, u'id': 2, u'error': None}
# or alternatively, if you don't have the TTS library installed:
>>> droid.makeToast('hello, my master')
{u'result': None, u'id': 1, u'error': None}

Now you have all the information you need to start exploring the API and roll  more interesting examples.

droid.makeToast