Android Things is Now Only for Smart Speakers and Displays

Google announced it is scaling back Android Things as a general-purpose IoT platform. Android Things will now focus solely on OEM-built smart speakers and displays. Google is discontinuing public access to i.MX8M, Snapdragon, and MediaTek based production modules for the OS. The ARM-based production boards from Innocomm, Intrinsyc, and MediaTek that Google was reselling to vendors with pre-loaded Android Things will no longer be publicly supported.

Gumstix has launched a version of its Linux-driven Chatterbox Alexa Voice Service development board designed for the RPi Compute Module. Designed by Gumstix in Geppetto, and following the Amazon AVS functional design guide, The Chatterbox for Raspberry Pi CM provides a feature rich development platform for Alexa Voice Service projects.

Two years after the arrival of the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B, which brought wireless and 64-bit ARMv8 computing to what was already the most popular Linux hacking platform of all time, Raspberry Pi Trading and the Raspberry Pi Foundation have delivered a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ with a faster processor, WiFi, and Ethernet. The Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ has gone on sale for $35, boosting the Model B’s quad -A53 SoC to 1.4GHz, speeding the WiFi to precertified, dual-band 802.11ac, and adding USB-based GbE with PoE support.