Deploying a Galaxy Nexus phone

This page describes the hardware and software setup to get a Galaxy Nexus device on LAVA.

Preparing the phone

Hardware

Power supply: 4V/2A. Note that the power supply has to to stabilized to avoid ripple. Cut the wire and separate the positive and negative poles. Ideally you also want to put some terminals in these poles, to avoid having to clip into raw wires. Red is positive and black is negative.

images/nexus/01-power-supply.small.jpg

Alligator clips. The alligator ends go into the power supply terminals, and the other end in the phone battery pins. On the Nexus 7, the positive (red) wire plugs into the first battery contact from left to right, and the negative to the third one.

aligator-clips aligator-clips-on-battery

Optional: stand. Ideally you want the phone to stand up so that you can look at the screen with your hands free, and to prevent the terminals of tha alligator clips that are plugged into the phone from rubbing against your desk (what may cause them to be disconnected). You can make a stand easily by cutting a cardboard box as shown in the image below. It will keep the Nexus 7 standing (provided it has the USB cable plugged in), and as a bonus you can keep most of the wires inside the box.

images/nexus/04-complete-setup-with-stand.small.jpg

Software

  • ensure you have fastboot installed (android-tools-fastboot package on Debian/Ubuntu)

  • plug USB cable to the phone

  • erase the boot partition:

  • turn off the phone, and turn if on again while holding the volume up and volume down buttons. This will make the phone enter the bootloader screen.

  • Issue the following command to erase the boot partition:

    $ fastboot erase boot
    $ fastboot erase recovery
    
  • Now every time the phone is turned on, it will enter the bootloader, with which we can interact through the fastboot program. LAVA will use fastboot to flash test images and control the phone in general.

Preparing LAVA

Single phone

For a single phone, you only need the usual LAVA setup process. Say you want the phone to appear as nexus01, then you create nexus01.conf with the following content:

#/etc/lava-dispatcher/devices/nexus01.conf
device_type = nexus

Note: you will also want to configure hard_reset_command for your device in order to reboot it when a test image hangs.

After that, you just do the usual LAVA setup steps: log in as admin user, go to administration panel, create a device type called “nexus” and a device called “nexus01” with device type “nexus”.

Multiple phones

If you have multiple phones plugged into a single PC, you will need to add some extra settings to each phone’s device config.

First, get the serial number for each phone. Once the phone is set up as described above and booted into its bootloader, plug it into your PC and run the following command:

fastboot devices

Alternatively, if the phone is already running Android, you might get its serial number with:

adb devices

Then, for each phone, override the settings adb_command and fastboot command. For example, for nexus01, you would put the following in nexus01.conf:

#/etc/lava-dispatcher/devices/nexus01.conf
device_type = nexus
adb_command = adb -s NEXUS01SERIAL
fastboot_command = sudo fastboot -s NEXUS01SERIAL

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