MicroEJ’s development kit supports Android Studio and Gradle
The MicroEJ VEE Android compatibility kit by MicroEJ is designed for manufacturers of IoT and embedded devices to access the Android Studio ecosystem. MicroEJ VEE shares the same technology principles as Android and now also supports the development.
By enabling the same software to run on either MicroEJ or Android execution environment, manufacturers can easily switch from a powerful processor to a smaller one, for example, from an Arm Cortex-A to an Arm Cortex-M, to dramatically reduce energy consumption, said MicroEJ.
MicroEJ enables development on virtual devices to parallelise hardware and software development and speed up specification validation. Android Studio can launch MicroEJ virtual devices and Android virtual devices.
The MicroEJ Android compatibility kit enables two processors to co-exist and distribute the same tasks between a very powerful processor powered by Android and a low-power processor powered by MicroEJ to “dramatically reduce” energy consumption.
Another feature is that by using standard software containers, the application code built with MicroEJ is portable on the best hardware, independently from real time operating system (RTOS) and OS combinations. It accelerates hardware evaluations and fosters the development of derivative products via software API reuse.
The large ecosystem of Java / Kotlin developers can now use popular tools such as IntelliJ Idea, Android Studio and Gradle to build MicroEJ applications, leveraging low-power features within MicroEJ VEE.
Hardware IP can also be leveraged for vector graphics. MicroEJ VEE eases the usage of graphic processing units (GPU), enabling a similar look and feel as smartphone apps. MicroVG provides support for Android Vector Drawables and SVG formats for UI / UX on any type of screen and leverages any vector GPU when necessary, said the company.
The MicroEJ Android compatibility kit is suitable for battery-operated industries such as smart watches and thermostats and is a lightweight option that enables to expand product lines with the same user experience from low-end to premium devices.
“With this new offering from MicroEJ, developers can utilise processor capabilities while minimising software development costs. This is of great value to our customers, particularly for those who build multiple product families using the breadth of our advanced portfolio of secure and energy efficient embedded processors from MCUs, to crossover i.MX RT and i.MX applications processors. For example, our recent collaboration with MicroEJ to enable the i.MX RT500 crossover MCU has been highly successful in simplifying access to its unique architecture of low-power and graphics,” said Joe Yu, vice president and general manager, IoT edge processing line, at NXP Semiconductors.
