[Commotion-dev] Commotion Android build/install/testing

[Will Hawkins]

Hello Doug!

Thanks for your email.

On 10/10/2012 01:54 PM, Doug Reith wrote:
> Hello Commotion,
> 
> I was experimenting with building and installing the Commotion Android
> application from the instructions in the readme
> <https://code.commotionwireless.net/projects/commotion-android/repository/revisions/master/entry/README>.
> I hit a few obstacles and had a few questions:
> 
> 1. Initially the make build for the Android app was failing. I
> eventually realized that the Makefile conditionally assigns 9 as the
> Android SDK platform in line 11: SDK_PLATFORM_LEVEL ?= 9. From what I
> read 9 is obsolete. The build ran sucessfully with platform level 16.
> Which SDK API Level should I be using? 

Yes, level 9 is obsolete. We stuck with that one initially since it is
compatible some of the older phones running older releases of the
Android OS that we are targeting. As long as you are building with an
SDK/NDK that is compatible with the platform on which you are going to
deploy then you'll be fine! You can override the SDK_PLATFORM_LEVEL from
the command line by adding SDK_PLATFORM_LEVEL=16, for example, to any of
the make commands from the README. It's a shortcut for having to edit
the Makefile. The same trick applies for overriding the
NDK_PLATFORM_VARIABLE.

> 
> 2. I had to explore quite a bit of the Android Developers documentation
> to fill in the gaps of the Readme instructions. Including setting
> up device detecting on Ubuntu
> <http://developer.android.com/tools/device.html#setting-up>. Are there
> other Commotion Android resources (besides the readme) that provide
> instructions on testing or troubleshooting?

We do not yet have any of that type of documentation. We do have some
instructions on our internal wiki that document how to setup the Android
development environment under Ubuntu but we have not yet published that
externally. Do you think that's something that would help developers? If
so, we could move that from our internal wiki to the public wiki.

> 
> 3. After installing the app on two HTC mobile devices, we tested them
> and they are either crashing or not fully functional. What is the best
> way for me to debug this? Should I run the app with adb logcat and share
> my findings on this commotion-dev? Is the commotion-android listserv not
> in use? 

This is absolutely the place for that debugging. Please send along your
logcat output and we will start the debugging process. I'm sorry to hear
that you are having trouble. There are two possible explanations for the
failure: 1) you've found a bug in our application or 2) the phone that
you are using has a wifi chipset that is incompatible with adhoc mode.
In either case, having that logcat output will get us going in the right
direction!

Thanks for taking the time to write out your experiences. I look forward
to hearing back from you and taking this conversation forward.

Will

> 
> *Douglas G Reith*
> Developer
> 313.437.1244 <tel:313.437.1244> (office)
> theworkdept.com <http://theworkdept.com/>
> 
> 
> 
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