This same week and by surprise, the Raspberry Pi 2 was presented, which offers us greater power and some more features than previous versions, although it maintains its low price, within the reach of all pockets. Most of those who buy these types of devices, they tend to be people who love to investigate and let's say "fiddle". That is why today we have decided to mess around for a while and propose this tutorial with which you can install Android on your Raspberry.
Before starting, it is interesting to make it clear that in order to install the Google software on a Raspberry, it is necessary to have one of these devices and also be clear that we will not be able to install Android 5.0 or 4.4, but that it will be an older version, but just as useful.
First of all we will need to have a Android ROM. The best known is CyanogenMod and the most used for these things is version 7.2, which you can download from the link that we have left at the end of this article next to the "Download" section. This ROM can be downloaded in principle to your computer, but then you must store it on an SD card of at least 4 GB that is formatted in FAT 32.
Once we have completed the first steps, we must be clear about where we are going to install Android on the Raspberry Pi and the steps to follow will depend very much if we do it on a computer with a Windows operating system or with another operating system. In the event that this tutorial does not work for you, we recommend that you try RaspAnd to put Android on the Raspberry.
Installing Android on a Raspberry from Windows
The steps to follow to installing Android from Windows is certainly simple. Download the ROM that we have already talked about previously, unzip it with Winrar and insert the .img file into the SD card. You can do this using the software, which can be downloaded for free, Win 32 Disk Imager.
Now place the SD card in your Raspberry Pi and you can start to get the most out of the Android operating system from your device.
Installing Android on a Raspberry from other operating systems
If you have Linux:
- Download the CyanogenMod ROM that we have already talked about before
- Once the download is complete, we open the terminal and install p7zip with the following command: sudo apt-get install p7zip-full
- Now we must extract the contents of the package. For this we must use the command; 7za and file_path.7z
- Copy to the SD with the command sudo dd bs = 4M if = file_path.img of = / dev / sdc, replacing sdc with the label assigned to our SD card
- Once we finish copying the file to the SD card, we will only have to insert it into our Raspberry Pi and start enjoying Android
If you have OS X:
- As in all the previous cases, the first step will be to download the CyanogenMod ROM
- Once the download has been completed, we must now open the file with the corresponding tool
- Now we must copy the .img file to the SD card for which we must use the command; sudo dd if = file_path.img of = / Dev / disk1s1 bs = 1m– changing the term "disk1s1" by the BSD name of our SD card.
- When the copy is finished we can insert the SD card into our Raspberry Pi and start using Android on it.
Download - CyanogenMod 7.2