How to Properly Mirror CyanogenMod

Recently I needed to create a mirror of CyanogenMod to facilities further development of our smartphone testbed PhoneLab. The goal is to have a working mirror that we can stage any experimental changes on our own server, since there is no plan to publish such changes to upstream (at least for now). Quite surprisingly, I found this to be a non-trivial task. Here is a log of I walked around the minefield.

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Build AOSP 5.1.1 for Nexus 5

I this post I will talk about the extra steps to build a usable Lollipop (5.1.1) ROM for LG Nexus 5 (hammerhead) device. Most of the functionalities work out of box (bluetooh, Wifi tethering, camera, etc), but there are some show-stoppers.

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Monitor Screen Touch Event in Android

Date Category Android

In one of my projects I need to track every screen touch event in background. That is, my app needs to be "invisible" while capturing every screen touch. Here is how I achieved this.

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Regular Expression Support in Android Logcat Tag Filters

For a while I've been using logcat command line tools to check Android logs. Usually, the tags of my app consist of a common prefix and the name of different sub-components (I guess that's also what most apps do). And I have about a dozen of such tags. logcat, however, does not support filtering tags using regular expressions, which is a pain! After suffering for a long time, I finally decide to tackle this.

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Get Packet Signal Strength of RTL8187 Dongle

In one of my research projects, I used Android PCAP Capture with ALFA RTL8187L dongles to capture Wi-Fi packets on Android phones. One problem I encountered was that per packet RSSI is missing. After poking around the source code for couple of days, I finally figured out how to get this information. In short, the per packet RSSI information IS indeed reported by the hardware, yet the current Android PCAP app doesn't collect it.

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