{"id":1613,"date":"2014-09-25T13:41:58","date_gmt":"2014-09-25T03:41:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.malcolmgroves.com\/blog\/?p=1613"},"modified":"2014-09-25T13:45:57","modified_gmt":"2014-09-25T03:45:57","slug":"running-firemonkey-apps-on-the-beaglebone-black","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.malcolmgroves.com\/blog\/?p=1613","title":{"rendered":"Running FireMonkey apps on the Beaglebone Black"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is the Beaglebone Black<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Beaglebone<\/a><\/p>\n

It’s a single-board computer, about the size of a credit card. It’s powered by an\u00a0ARM Cortex A8 and includes the NEON floating point accelerator.\u00a0Happily that matches nicely with the Android device requirements<\/a> for RAD Studio and AppMethod.<\/p>\n

When I saw that, I wondered what it would take to deploy a FireMonkey app to it. Like most things, it’s pretty easy once you know how, but it took me a few false starts to get it all figured out. Further, much of the information online assumes you’ll be doing this from Linux. Given my aim of running\u00a0FireMonkey apps on the Beaglebone, I really wanted to show the steps from Windows.<\/p>\n

So here they are.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Step 1: Get an\u00a0Android image on a MicroSD card<\/h2>\n

The Beaglebone Black ships with a Linux distribution called Angstrom. So the first step is to get Android running on it instead.<\/p>\n

If you are really keen, there are steps for building Android from the source. However, initially I just want to see if I can make it work, so I’ll use a pre-built KitKat image available here<\/a><\/p>\n

Once you’ve you unzipped that image, you should have a file called\u00a0BBB-aosp-4.4.4_r1-sd.img. Next\u00a0we need to get it onto a MicroSD Card that we can use to boot the Beaglebone Black. You need a card at least 4gb in size. 8gb cards seem to be the smallest I could easily find, so that’s what I used.<\/p>\n

To do this, you’ll need a few things:<\/p>\n