Android Lollipop dual display/app demo on i.MX6

Published on July 4, 2015

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Our i.MX6 boards support up to four displays, and we've been asked a number of times about dual display in Android.

At long last, we now have a dual display demo using our latest Android Lollipop 5.0 release that shows separate applications on each display.

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNaExTJ49TM[/embed]

We want to thank Dariusz Kluska for his OkienkaTest app that runs multiple activities in Android Lollipop as shown below. The appplication uses ActivityView for embedding multiple activities inside one application to create multiwindow solutions for Android.

We built upon this app to use the secondary display API introduced back in JellyBean that allows a single app displaying different content on the available screens:

https://developer.android.com/about/versions/android-4.2.html#SecondaryDisplays

Darek helped us understand how to achieve what we were looking for, especially getting the input dispatched properly. The source code for the app is available on github:

https://github.com/boundarydevices/OkienkaTest

The demo is run on a Nitrogen6x with our two 7" displays (LVDS Hannstar and RGB Okaya), so it is compatible with all our i.MX6 platforms (Nitrogen6_max, Nit6xlite, SabreLite).