Database Users

Hardware for Android Device

Hey guys,
Recently I have been seeing companies releasing devices for Android that are not phones e.g.
Android USB Sticks:
techland.time.com/2012/05/18/pc-in-your-pocket-74-android-stick-goes-on-sale/
or more recently a game console:
kickstarter.com/projects/ouya/ouya-a-new-kind-of-video-game-console
I'm in University now studying Electrical Engineering and I've had an interest in electronics since I was young, so now I thought it was possible for me to design my own device. But so far my only luck with getting anywhere was drafting designs of the device and finding development boards online. Sure i could start off with development boards to test software (which i'm planning to do) but I am quite lost as to where I should go next. For example where to I get a manufacturer to produce my device or where to purchase a processor/motherboard that is custom designed for my project.
It would be really great if someone could point me in the right direction,
Scott

that's an ambitious project, I've just finished 2 degrees in EE and in the long term i'm looking to do similiar projects, but right now it is beyond my capabilities. But what i have done is buy a very cheap dev kit from STmicroelectronics with their ARM m4 chip onboard. (STM32F4)
this chip should be powerful enough to get started on and all the pins are broken out, plus the device includes a programmer and is powered over usb.
It was less than €20 but is still sat in its box as I've a lot to learn before cracking it open.
Have you any experience with RTOS for ARM, Keil offer a free trial version of their well respected uVision MDK software, it supports the above board directly and removes the need to configure a tool chain etc. Personally i'm trying to get eclipse on ubuntu to program it bit Keil uVision will allow me to blink LED's etc so long as my program is under 4Kb.
I too am only starting down this project but i hope the little i know has been of some help.
As for custom devices, well thats a whole other ball game, you will need to make out a schematic, then a board layout, then gerber files. After that you need a small run on a pick and place / reflow line. It's very rare these work out first time round, attention has to be paid to details like noise sinking, pull up resistors, matching logic levels and optically isolating external devices etc.
It's great that you are looking beyond your course material, I've learned much more from personal geekery rather than just taking notes from a lecturer. Anything you do outside the course will benefit you in a better degree at the end.

I've never been designing device from scratch, and I'm also just first grade student. Anyway I could imagine how this might look for small company or single person:
1) Decide what do you want to build-up. Easiest todo is custom dev-board, it can be always redesigned and packed into tablet case. The hardest to-do is mobile phone, and it's nearly impossible to create such thing due to high level of embedding everything, and need to sign pretty serious agreements with RF CPU (and other things like transceivers, antennas, duplexers) supplier like Infineon or Qualcomm.
2) Think what main components you'll need, like LPDDR, SoC (CPU), PMIC (SoC manufacturer usually recommend PMICs to be used and provide reference board schemas for using both), battery fuel gauge, charging controller (both might be built into PMIC, depends on model), screen+touchscreen (there are dozens of such, one might want to decide its size already, but in case of dev-board like build it usually can be replaced by some smaller/bigger with small HW modifications or without modifications at all), sensors like gyro, compass, pressure, light, whatever.
3) Search through suppliers websites and decide what models of ICs you want to use (I'd pick only open hardware), order engineering samples and get reference schemas, rather start from SoC(OMAP4460 for eg.)+PMIC pair, then decide about the rest.
4) Don't forget about extension slots like USB ports, DC supply, serial converters, whatsoever.
5) Start designing PCB board. IMO it's impossible for begginer to project any usable PCB for embedded system, I'm begginer and I'm failing with simplest boost HF DC/DC converters (like 10-20 parts on board), while such board would have thousands of elements on it, and multi layer board to fit it everything in some rational size.
6) Find company that will make prototype for you - they should make board + solder all the components you provide them - one with no professional (and very, very expensive) soldering stations is not able to solder BGA components at home.
7) Test it out.
Relatively, assuming that main components are free engineering samples, this might be not so money-expensive way to create some useful stuff. But for sure it's very, very time expensive, and begginer alone will nearly for sure fail.
//edit:
I just re-read my post and figured it might be pretty demotivating. I'm not saying it's impossible, but I'd suggest you to start from something easier - ARM dev board is the thing you need. As Quiggers stated above.

Just noticed these - cheap and powerful dev boards:
http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Allwinner_A10#Other

Custom design
I'm looking to do the same, has this worked for you? I'm looking to build a custom android based mobile device as the original poster. I haven't had any look finding the correct electrical or device engineer to provide me any assistance. Are you available to assist?
Quiggers said:
that's an ambitious project, I've just finished 2 degrees in EE and in the long term i'm looking to do similiar projects, but right now it is beyond my capabilities. But what i have done is buy a very cheap dev kit from STmicroelectronics with their ARM m4 chip onboard. (STM32F4)
this chip should be powerful enough to get started on and all the pins are broken out, plus the device includes a programmer and is powered over usb.
It was less than €20 but is still sat in its box as I've a lot to learn before cracking it open.
Have you any experience with RTOS for ARM, Keil offer a free trial version of their well respected uVision MDK software, it supports the above board directly and removes the need to configure a tool chain etc. Personally i'm trying to get eclipse on ubuntu to program it bit Keil uVision will allow me to blink LED's etc so long as my program is under 4Kb.
I too am only starting down this project but i hope the little i know has been of some help.
As for custom devices, well thats a whole other ball game, you will need to make out a schematic, then a board layout, then gerber files. After that you need a small run on a pick and place / reflow line. It's very rare these work out first time round, attention has to be paid to details like noise sinking, pull up resistors, matching logic levels and optically isolating external devices etc.
It's great that you are looking beyond your course material, I've learned much more from personal geekery rather than just taking notes from a lecturer. Anything you do outside the course will benefit you in a better degree at the end.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse

Technexion
I have used OMAP3530 CPU. The TAO3530 is a good starting point and you can get a Tsunami board.

s8500 board with tablet touchscreen
hi dudes,
i have an old wave s8500 but the screen is broken. and i have an old tablet screen 7" from herotab8/dropad8.
can i use the tablet screen with the s8500 board? is not drivers necessary for the touchscreen? and where will i get the drivers?
and do i not need the datasheets of the pins to connect?
)

What we REALLY need is for someone to make a SoC that's basically like the one in the Raspberry Pi, but substitutes a FPGA for the GPU that's big enough to re-implement GPU functionality... long after the chip has left the fab & gotten soldered onto an open-ended generic ARM stick with no specific purpose, and thus manages to officially avoid getting infected by DRM-mandated licensing terms (ie, anything *officially* licensed to support h.264 or HDMI) that keep making totally open drivers nearly impossible. After all, if the drivers were 100% open source, there's no way they can stop you from commenting out the part responsible for implementing Cinavia, or lying to endpoint devices (like your home theater amp) about HDCP compliance
To deflect infringement claims, a company that made Android boards from the FPGA-equipped SoCs could make it with a soldered-on DVI port instead of HDMI (HDMI connectors are encumbered by viral licensing, DVI isn't), and put a reference design on their website for a wacky octopus cable that used the DVI-A pins to output unbuffered 3-bit pseudo-VGA, and used the remaining pins as a high-density breakout connector for a bunch of half-duplex RS-485 ports and GPIO lines that just *happened* to use DVI/HDMI logic levels
Of course, you'd never be able to legally sell a product based upon that board to end users in the US with the taboo technologies supported "out of the box", but other companies outside the US not subject to our self-inflicted wackiness could, and hopefully WOULD, buy enough of those boards to drive the price down enough to make them cheap for American hobbyists to buy on eBay and use for our own guerrilla Android-powered hardware projects.
In theory, the Xilinx Zynq 7000 series sort of does this... but at the moment, they're so ungodly expensive, you could almost buy a half-dozen Nexus 7 tablets for the price of their Android-capable dev board.

sounds great dude

Nice
Nice post

Hardware for Android D
Its not even turning on now...guess i will have to take it to a computer shop now, are you sure it has to be major things like "dead hard drive to a burned up chip to a bad motherboard."?

Modular HW board for designing a mobile phone from pieces

Hello XDA,
imagine, for building specific model of dell, their technicians prepare a list of hardware pieces and then they test them and choose the magic combo based on price and characteristics of these HW pieces. It's pretty simple with regular desktop PCs.
I'd like to know if there is anything like this for mobile phones. I know about beagleboard, pandaboard (i've read about them, but never used them). Is there something that I could use to test different components from different vendors... e.g. try out some SOCs from TI or Qualcom; a camera chipset etc etc. Can somebody direct me in the proper direction? Basically I'd like to know who things like this are done and where to start from. I'm aminly interested in android related development.

Such HW boards are mostly proprietary and heavy guarded stuff of companies like Samsung or Motorola. There are probably generic sets aswell, like test hardware produced by Lauterbach, but rather targeted for any ICs, though expect it to be horrible expensive. I've also seen boards produced by TI and Silicon Labs compatibile with few of their components (like SoC+some RF chip+PMIC) allowing to choose optimal configuration.
But AFAIK it's more matter of careful analyse of IC's characterstics before you build something, than just connecting everything up in various combos and empirically testing what's working better and what's working worse.

Rebellos said:
Such HW boards are mostly proprietary and heavy guarded stuff of companies like Samsung or Motorola. There are probably generic sets aswell, like test hardware produced by Lauterbach, but rather targeted for any ICs, though expect it to be horrible expensive. I've also seen boards produced by TI and Silicon Labs compatibile with few of their components (like SoC+some RF chip+PMIC) allowing to choose optimal configuration.
But AFAIK it's more matter of careful analyse of IC's characterstics before you build something, than just connecting everything up in various combos and empirically testing what's working better and what's working worse.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Hi Rebellos,
thanks for reply. I suspected something like that. At some time I remember seeing specs of some chips on TI and they provide all kinds of drivers test code etc even system images or stuff like. So, at least with TI chips, probably beagle-board is the way to go since it's their pet, I'm I right about that?

mtlgui said:
Hi Rebellos,
thanks for reply. I suspected something like that. At some time I remember seeing specs of some chips on TI and they provide all kinds of drivers test code etc even system images or stuff like. So, at least with TI chips, probably beagle-board is the way to go since it's their pet, I'm I right about that?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
PandaBoard is the OMAP4-based successor to Beagle, and TI also has heavy involvement in that project too.
Or perhaps wait to see what happens with OMAP5 - it's almost guaranteed there will be a ???Board based on OMAP5 similar to Beagle/Panda.

Yeah, PandaBoard might be called "TI dev platform" and seems like they are using it for testing various own ICs as it's extremally flexible (OMAP4 has many various interfaces and nearly all of these are breaked out on Panda)
I'd expect OMAP5 Panda-like successor available in few months.

I think they're all vendor-specific. Here's qualcomm's snapdragon dev boards. They've got the snapdragon 3 (galaxy s II cpu) and snapdragon 4 available through bsquare.com:
DragonBoard

Setting up LCD with Android

I'm just looking to be pointed in the right general direction here.
How would I go about hooking up an LCD and touch panel to an Android board (Raspberry PI or something similar). This is for an embedded device.
Something like a Hannstar HSD062IDW1

sbarrow said:
I'm just looking to be pointed in the right general direction here.
How would I go about hooking up an LCD and touch panel to an Android board (Raspberry PI or something similar). This is for an embedded device.
Something like a Hannstar HSD062IDW1
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Hey, most of these ARM dev boards have raw LCD headers. If you're an electronics designer then you can go design a PCB to do things like level shift those bits and maybe convert those parallel signals to something else (LVDS or HDMI or watever). But from what I understand, you already have a video out in the form of HDMI and svideo. Some of us here at ArcDatum have done embedded systems research on a whole bunch of ARM boards (BeagleBoard, Pandaboard, the obscure ODROID-X) and almost all of them should have LCD headers. As for touch screens, that's more difficult. Chances are you'll have to use GPIOs or find a screen with HDMI input and USB output for touch sensing. Otherwise you'll have to design an touch screen input/output driver (which actually isn't that hard once you know how.....finding out how is the difficult part since so many of the chips they use have little or no documentation).
You might be in luck with iPhone screens. I personally have heard rumors of people reverse engineering the screen signals and driving them.
Edit: So i looked at your Hannstar link. Looks like you have a 10.5V LED backlight. So u'll have to drive that separately; that's easy enough. As for the actual signals. Looks like the pinouts you have all the RGB 8bit per color channels as well as your power stuff, ground stuff, and your clock inputs all of which can come from either your LCD header on ur RPi (if it has one; i know the BeagleBoard-XM has them) or an external power supply (for Vcc etc). Note you should tie all grounds together in many cases. As for the other random signals you will have to figure out if they're necessary to connect to something (Even if it's ground) or if you can leave them floating. Watch out for your voltage levels and how much current the RGB signals on the display will sink. Likely case is you have to do a level shift from something like 1.8V logic to 3.3V logic or something like that. When you're picking your IC to do that level shifting, also be very aware that the IC has to be able to change from 0 to 3.3V fast enough. You will have to verify that within one clock cycle, the slew rate of every pin (aka each bit for the RGB channels) is high enough to change from a high value to low or vice versa before the next clock edge comes along. If not you're data will be considered corrupt or just completely invalid.
Edit2: Your title states that you're trying to make this work with Android. I think in fact you are trying to drive the LCD with the System on a Chip on the RPi. Depending on the SoC and kernel, you might have to enable the LCD header pinouts in the kernel. Don't quote me on this though. I could be totally bull****ting you. My GUESS is that the same signals that go to the HDMI chip go to the header and in fact when using the header, you're just pulling the logic of those same signal lines (which also means you have to be extra careful of the current you're sourcing from those lines)

I wish to understand your motivation.
There are plenty of cheap Android tablets available with LCD touch screen. Now instead of trying to use one of these you want to get inferior "WhateverBerry" and engineer LCD interface + software stack etc spending your time and money.
Am I correct describing your intention?
Also I am not sure that Android is a good fit for embedded development which is mostly applied to some type of real-time controllers. It is not real-time OS.
If your want to build quickly an embedded controller with LCD touch you can get it done using Arduino boards. There are few LCD modules with touch capabilities available but with very poor documentation. It will require some work but it is feasible to achieve in a few days. It would cost you about $100 in components including Arduino and LCD shield and software is free.
Good luck!
sbarrow said:
I'm just looking to be pointed in the right general direction here.
How would I go about hooking up an LCD and touch panel to an Android board (Raspberry PI or something similar). This is for an embedded device.
Something like a Hannstar HSD062IDW1
Click to expand...
Click to collapse

Adapt0r said:
I wish to understand your motivation.
There are plenty of cheap Android tablets available with LCD touch screen. Now instead of trying to use one of these you want to get inferior "WhateverBerry" and engineer LCD interface + software stack etc spending your time and money.
Am I correct describing your intention?
Also I am not sure that Android is a good fit for embedded development which is mostly applied to some type of real-time controllers. It is not real-time OS.
If your want to build quickly an embedded controller with LCD touch you can get it done using Arduino boards. There are few LCD modules with touch capabilities available but with very poor documentation. It will require some work but it is feasible to achieve in a few days. It would cost you about $100 in components including Arduino and LCD shield and software is free.
Good luck!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I agree with this, for the most part. Although theres no reason his application wouldnt be better with Android. What if theyre making some sort of consumer friendly appliance. Android wud be a great place to start. Arduinos wud be good for tiny applications but if they want anything pretty it wont have enough horse power.
Also Im not sure how RTOS fits into this. Sure Android isnt an RTOS, but ur phone is Android and thats an embedded system too. Just because it isnt deterministic doesnt mean it isnt suited for embedded. Just go look at basically any of the Texas Instruments ARM based android/linux dev boards.
Anyway back to the topic at hand. If you want a high powered device then try a BeagleBoard with a third party LCD attachment. It wont be cheap, you would basically have an android tablet only itd be for development (and I mean product development, not just software development). But if you dont need 700+mghz of 32 bit addressing lol, then yes go with a much cheaper arduino and lcd.
Edit: Look at this, I think you'll like it (its an all in one ARM development board):
e2e.ti.com/group/universityprogram/educators/w/wiki/2252.am335x-starter-kit.aspx?sp_rid_pod4=MTk2NzAwNDYzODgS1&sp_mid_pod4=40798754
Also I should clarify Arduinos are a 'cheaper' solution, not a 'cheap' solution. Arduinos are not cheap for the amount of processing power u get and they are almost never suited for LCD applications (but there are a few).
Sent from my SGH-I747M using xda app-developers app

I am glad to have this discussion, it helps to clarify choices we make and avoid waste of time.
RTOS is needed if high rate data acquisition is the core application. If time uncertainty of Android apps execution is tolerable then it might be a good choice considering great UI and communication capabilities.
A number of projects utilize commercial Android hardware with external Bluetooth or USB accessory/ host. In this configuration external accessory acquires and stores data in a buffer, Android terminal reads this data buffer and then does data processing and visualization if necessary.
This combination looks the most efficient since it provides great flexibility with minimal resources.
Low price of Raspberry PI and good marketing attracted a lot of people but usability of this board is very limited. You get what you paid for. It is underpowered for modern Linux and Android, does not have ADC, not suitable for low power (battery) applications. Originally, its main purpose was declared to make learning of programming languages more accessible.
Cheers!

screen
hello Folks,
i even have a broken tablet, but the touchscreen is still ok.
and i still have a samsung wave s8500 with broken screen but it still running.
is there any solution how i can connect the 7 inch screen with the wave?
the 7 inch screen is a mid tablet dropad/haipad.
is there any link to hardware manuall..
and where can i get the driver of the mid?
thanks in advance

Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 7" to LCD
is ther anyone trying connect samsung galaxy tab 2 7" to LCD
or it is imposible.... (

Home-Made Android Console???

Hi, XDA Community!
Is it possible to make my own Android console with components off the internet?
I was mainly aiming to by the OUYA but betting on a Tegra3 device isn't convincing enough after seeing the potential Tegra4 has.
So, is there a way to make my out Tegra4 device with simple AOSP ROM to hook with my TV and use whatever I like???

If you have to ask, then no. Do you own the necessary equipment to even solder a tegra chip to the main board?

That's exactly my question.
Is it anywhere possible to create an Android console with PC-like components?

You can give this a whirl I suppose.
www.howchip.com/shop/item.php?it_id=BRIX5250A

www.gamestick.tv
Sent from my Galaxy Note 2 on XDA

That Exynos board looks nice enough though I was looking for one with Tegra4 for game support.
Samsung is doing a good job too, anyway ?
And for the second link, it looks good plug-and-play-wise but its components are a bit out of date (only 1GB RAM... etc.).
Still good to know there's people working on that, though.
Seeing how I can't let go of my Android phone, I wanted a full entertainment center on a bigger screen.
I thought the OUYA would blow my mind but then came more ?

Fredrick Sylar said:
That Exynos board looks nice enough though I was looking for one with Tegra4 for game support.
Samsung is doing a good job too, anyway ?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I find it extremely unlikely that Tegra 4 would come out with a Dev Board of some sort. Tegra is generally quite closed when it comes to this sort of thing. Samsung on the other hand does license its chips to other people.

Then probably waiting a little for a board with their Octa chip.
I don't know if it was possible but a custom kernel to operate with all 8 cores and liquid coolant would make one badass entertainment center ?
EDIT: thanks fellas.
You've been really helpful.

hardware upgrade for smartphone?

hi there
just wanna know if it is possible or not to upgrade smartphone hardware like in desktop computer... etc ?
thx devs

With the exception of Project Ara, no. The reason for this is because, as smartphones are designed to be light on space, and extremely efficient, almost all of the components are directly soldered to the motherboard, and are so small that they're almost transparent when you look at them from the side. Therefore, until modular phones are available, this is both impossible and impractical.

Yes it actually is,but many people say its not.If you have phone like for example galaxy s 3 and yoy whant to have more ram you can find out ram fot galaxy s 4 and change it.It has the same size but im not sure is any phone service doing that.U can upgrade normal memory with SD card,if you still whant more you can buy bigger SD card.I think that noone needs SD bigger than 8gb
Sent from my SM-G355HN using XDA Premium 4 mobile app

QwerLoL said:
Yes it actually is,but many people say its not.If you have phone like for example galaxy s 3 and yoy whant to have more ram you can find out ram fot galaxy s 4 and change it.It has the same size but im not sure is any phone service doing that.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
So tell me more, I'm a little skeptical about what you said...
Knowing that the RAM is embedded in the same chip as the CPU and GPU (SoC) (Exynos 4412 4 on SGS3 and Exynos 5410 on SGS4). You are saying that the consumer or a repair shop can remove the 4412 from a his SGS3 and replace it with a 5410? Even if both chips aren't the same architecture? Are they soldered to the motherboard?
Would love to see some references...
U can upgrade normal memory with SD card,if you still whant more you can buy bigger SD card.I think that noone needs SD bigger than 8gb
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yeah obviously, not really an upgrade to the phone memory itself but more like adding on some parallel memory. And not all phones can use sd cards, even some high end phones can't.

Parallel memory isnt possible to add right now,maby it ll be possible for few years but not now :/ That what i said for RAM cant really help you.I said its possible to change ram but not like in home.There are some companies making phones with material you whant (u tell them how much ram and internal nemory you whant,soo its the same phone with changed ram memory) there are some Chinese companies what are doing that i hope you can understand what i was trying to say... Andswer for your first question is No you cant change ram and int mem by your self tell me what ever you whant about hardware and ...other rooting,unbricking things...
Sent from my SM-G355HN using XDA Premium 4 mobile app

so maybe forget about project ara as this phone will not have the design like iPhones... nexus phones with that gorgeous design... etc

Software UPGRADE
_PR3DATOR_ said:
hi there
just wanna know if it is possible or not to upgrade smartphone hardware like in desktop computer... etc ?
thx devs
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
My friend i tore up over a dozen android devices in last 6 months . To my suprise no two devices are using anything compatible with another. cleaning up bloatware and excess junk files along with some system tuning and i think youll be Suprised at what these devices can actually do and perform on a 15$ single core 4.0 ics device you can listen to music while downloading more while you browse the web and screen record it all at the same time. unless your trying to do serious graphical gaming on your phone while multitasking i think your good with anything 4. and up. System Tuner Pro rom toolbox pro check it out and enjoy my friend sd read speed has been default 128kb/s on my devices (a must change) Benchmark app hey

Android device are often using SoC solutions. (SoC: System on a Chip)
That means the whole system, CPU, GPU, RAM, wireless networks, bluetooth, Storage, I/O, GPS, Sensors, etc... are all integrated into one single chip. It is that what makes smartphones so efficient in power consumption and size.
There are other support-chips around the main SoC chip, but these usually handle lesser functions such as extra storage space, USB on the Go functionality etc...
Read on: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_on_a_chip

SysGhost said:
Android device are often using SoC solutions. (SoC: System on a Chip)
That means the whole system, CPU, GPU, RAM, wireless networks, bluetooth, Storage, I/O, GPS, Sensors, etc... are all integrated into one single chip. It is that what makes smartphones so efficient in power consumption and size.
There are other support-chips around the main SoC chip, but these usually handle lesser functions such as extra storage space, USB on the Go functionality etc...
Read on: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_on_a_chip
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
HI,
so, maybe is it possible to install a more powerfull camera module on a device like Htc One S?
For exapmle a front camera (from HTC One Mini) of 2Mpx instead of 0,3mpx camera of Htc One S.
Must I port libraries and Api to make it work? Or is it impossible?

Cusciolino said:
HI,
so, maybe is it possible to install a more powerfull camera module on a device like Htc One S?
For exapmle a front camera (from HTC One Mini) of 2Mpx instead of 0,3mpx camera of Htc One S.
Must I port libraries and Api to make it work? Or is it impossible?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Technically it is possible. But practically "doable" I'm not so sure of.
Most android-devices happen to use a common "camera interface" for the camera hardware-module.
But the layout, form factor, connector placement etc can be very different between the various Android models out there.
One cannot simply take a camera module from one model, and fit it inside another. Just the connector itself alone can vary heavily between models, not to mention the "flat flex cable" arrangement.
These reasons alone make it very hard to fit one camera module inside another device.
But let's pretend that one can find a camera module that does fit perfectly inside the phone in question, or that one is skilled enough to perform the modifications needed:
The Linux Kernel module.
Yep. The linux kernel need something too. It's not all plug'n'play with embedded situations such as smartphones. These devices aren't built for plug'n'play in mind. They are statically built. Once compiled, it's snug as a glove. Nothing more, nothing less.
But it's not all darkness around. Luckily the linux kernel is open source. Even when it comes to Android devices.
One can simply download the linux kernel source from the manufacturers web site, and import it to the Android Development Environment that one has prepared for this.
Next thing to fetch is the source code for the new camera module. This can be quite tricky, and is a show-stopper in many cases. Manufacturers often refuse to release these sources, and Android open source world end up with a "crippled state" for the module in question. Blame the hardware manufacturers for this.
But let's pretend that one have a camera module that happen to have its kernel driver "open source". Then one only need to download these sources, and patch them in.
Once the linux kernel has been patched, and the new camera module is available in the linux kernel configuration, one only need to enable it as a "module", and compile it.
Once compiled, one will end up with a "camera_module.ko".
This particular ko-file is what one need to transfer to the Android device in question, and tell Android init to load it.
Now... it should work... but it rarely does in real life. As you mention, there might be some special API and other stuff needed for the software in order to access the camera.
Once again: read the documentation for the camera module in question, and hope that the manufacturer of the camera module have used a commonly used API, and not a proprietary one.
That is enough of me babbling on about this. This is not supposed to be "absolute facts". These lines written are more meant as a general pointer of "what to expect if one tries".
Maybe someone else, more experienced in these matters, can shed some more light on this. I could be wrong.

SysGhost said:
Technically it is possible. But practically "doable" I'm not so sure of.
Most android-devices happen to use a common "camera interface" for the camera hardware-module.
But the layout, form factor, connector placement etc can be very different between the various Android models out there.
One cannot simply take a camera module from one model, and fit it inside another. Just the connector itself alone can vary heavily between models, not to mention the "flat flex cable" arrangement.
These reasons alone make it very hard to fit one camera module inside another device.
But let's pretend that one can find a camera module that does fit perfectly inside the phone in question, or that one is skilled enough to perform the modifications needed:
The Linux Kernel module.
Yep. The linux kernel need something too. It's not all plug'n'play with embedded situations such as smartphones. These devices aren't built for plug'n'play in mind. They are statically built. Once compiled, it's snug as a glove. Nothing more, nothing less.
But it's not all darkness around. Luckily the linux kernel is open source. Even when it comes to Android devices.
One can simply download the linux kernel source from the manufacturers web site, and import it to the Android Development Environment that one has prepared for this.
Next thing to fetch is the source code for the new camera module. This can be quite tricky, and is a show-stopper in many cases. Manufacturers often refuse to release these sources, and Android open source world end up with a "crippled state" for the module in question. Blame the hardware manufacturers for this.
But let's pretend that one have a camera module that happen to have its kernel driver "open source". Then one only need to download these sources, and patch them in.
Once the linux kernel has been patched, and the new camera module is available in the linux kernel configuration, one only need to enable it as a "module", and compile it.
Once compiled, one will end up with a "camera_module.ko".
This particular ko-file is what one need to transfer to the Android device in question, and tell Android init to load it.
Now... it should work... but it rarely does in real life. As you mention, there might be some special API and other stuff needed for the software in order to access the camera.
Once again: read the documentation for the camera module in question, and hope that the manufacturer of the camera module have used a commonly used API, and not a proprietary one.
That is enough of me babbling on about this. This is not supposed to be "absolute facts". These lines written are more meant as a general pointer of "what to expect if one tries".
Maybe someone else, more experienced in these matters, can shed some more light on this. I could be wrong.
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Great Explanation! Thank You a lot! I think that is not in my capabilities to do that but.. maybe I'll try when I have some freetime
thank you