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.

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.

One of the PhoneLab participants accidentally forgot the PIN code for his phone, thus can not access the phone at all. There are tremendous tutorials online on how to solve this. This is what I tested and worked.

IOzone is a famous file system benchmark tool in *nix world. In this post, I'll show you how to port it to Android and how to use it to benchmark both flash and Ramdisk's performance.

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.

AOSP ships with a bunch of tools that are very useful for platform release. I'll cover their usage and explain what they do in this post.

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.

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.

In my previous posts, I explained how to create a properly signed OTA package that will pass recovery's signature check, and how to verify the signed OTA package before apply it. Here, we'll discuss, when building an production AOSP platform, how to sign the platform and recovery image properly to match those signature checks.

I've been bothered by this message for a while when the device is in recovery mode.

$ adb devices
List of devices attached
????????????    no permissions