Android Automotive OS 11 USB image for the Raspberry Pi 4B

Updated 19th Nov 2021; We’re now providing images for a 32GB SD card in the onboard card reader instead of a USB stick.

In our previous post, we gave you details of how to build Android Automotive OS 11 (AAOS) with the Snapp Automotive additions for a Raspberry Pi 4B. We understand that to do this you need access to a reasonably powerful machine, so we’re making available a prebuilt image for a 32GB SD card for developers to experiment with.

The image we’re making available is the same as you would get from building the AAOS image we’ve previously posted about. So if you want to build your own you can, or you can just download and use the image.

To make things even more accessible, you won’t need a touch screen to use and interact with the build in this image; You can use any HDMI monitor and a mouse, and below is a photo of a test we’ve run on a Samsung TV with and a USB mouse attached to the Raspberry Pi.

AAOS on a RPi 4B using a Samsung TV as the display and a mouse for input

The image also has ADB over WiFi enabled by default so you will be able to connect your Raspberry Pi to a WiFi network, enable developer options, enable USB debugging, and then test your apps using the Android Debug Bridge over WiFi in the same way you would test on any other device.

You can download the image from https://downloads.snappautomotive.com/rpi/snapp_automotive_rpi4_32gb_20211119.img.zip

Writing the image to an SD Card

The download is a full-disk image in a zip file, and you can use any program capable of writing a .iso/.img image to a storage device once you’ve extracted the image from the Zip. If you used written disk images before you can follow the instructions provided by the Raspberry Pi foundation for Windows, Linux, macOS, or ChromeOS.

Booting from the SD Card

This is still a build in development, so it may take a few minutes to boot the first time, and tens of seconds to boot after that. This definitely is not a production optimized build, so feel free to submit pull requests if you can see opportunities for improvement.

Connecting to ADB over WiFi

To connect to the device using ADB over WiFi you will need to do the following;

1. Connect to the same network your development machine is running.
2. Enable developer mode on the Raspberry Pi.
3. Enable USB Debugging.
4. Identify the IP Address of your Raspberry Pi (You can click on the WiFi network name in the WiFi settings to find this out).
5. Run adb connect {ip_address}on your development machine to connect over WiFi.
6. Interact the AAOS on the Raspberry Pi using your usual adb commands.
7. …
8. Profit!

Known Issues

• Due to a known issue with the Raspberry Pi some displays may appear upside down. Due to the kernel configuration in the current build the recommended solution of using lcd_rotate=2 will not work.