Seven Square

Android screencast written in QT. There is one in java? forget it from now on.

A tool used to view a mirror screen of your Android device on the PC, show a demonstration, debugging and so on. You can even click on the mirrored screen just as you touch on the device panel.

• Tested hosts: Linux, Windows
• Tested devices: QRD8x25/8x26, Linaro Panda board (OMAP4430), TCL Idol X (MTK6589), LG Nexus 5X
• Tested Android versions: 4.0, 4.1, 4.2, 6.0, 8.0
• Tested Android build: user, userdebug

Features

Major:

• Click and swipe on the screen (so that you can unlock the screen by swipe)
• Virtual menu/home/back key on the UI
• QWERTY key support (just type via your keyboard)
• Auto connect to your device when plugged in
• Click on the window to wake up the device (emulate power key press event)
• Support both Android ICS and Jelly Bean. Froyo not fully tested
• Wrote in Qt 4.x, can be easily ported to a different desktop environment

Minor:

• Rotate view windows on demand (Press F12)
• Virtual cursor (pointer anchor) on the UI
• Auto resize to fit the screen resolution of the device
• Zoom window as your wish and maintain the aspect ratio
• Support customized 'screencap' for speeding up (RGBA32, RGB888, RGB565)
• Auto enable compressed data transfer if 'minigzip' is found on the host
• 1~2FPS on MSM8625 devices (1.2G dual core, 512M memory, 800x480)

Not a feature yet:

• Does not support multiple devices plugged in at the same time.
• Does not support screen recording
• Does not support taking screenshots

Additional Key Maps

You can press F1/2/3/4 on your keyboard to emulate the following Android key.

• For device:

   F1 AKEYCODE_HOME
   F2 AKEYCODE_BACK
   F3 AKEYCODE_CALL
   F4 AKEYCODE_ENDCALL
  

• For application on PC:

   F12 Rotate view window (Landscape/Portrait)
  

Requirements

Mandatory

• Linux, any distribution with Qt package.

• Qt 4.x+ installed in your system

• screencap command on the target device

   $> adb shell ls /system/bin/screencap
   /system/bin/screencap
  

  If the output indicates: 'No such file or directory', you can use the tool except install one by yourself.

  the 'screencap' source code is present in frameworks/base/cmds/screencap.

• PC: adb command is availible in your search path, check it:

   $> which adb
   /usr/bin/adb
  

• USB cable connected to your Android device

Optional

• Android device in engineer mode (rooted), So that you can get root permission in ADB shell

   $> adb root
   $> adb shell id
   uid=0(root) gid=0(root)
  

• minigzip installed on your PC (for compressed image transfer)

  There is a precompiled x86_64 minigzip binary in the contirbutes directory, just copy into your system path:

   $> sudo cp contributes/minigzip /usr/bin
  

  If you want to compile one for yourself, get it from android/external/zlib:

   $> cp -rf android/external/zlib zlib-pc
   $> cd zlib-pc
   $> ./configure
   $> make
   $> sudo cp minigzip /usr/bin
  

  It'll be appreciated If you can help add the decompression code into this project to help to avoid running external program 'minizip' to decompress frame buffer data.

• Reduce screen data size generated by screencap

  Currently, we use 'screencap' command on the device to capture the screen content, bigger screen resolution causes more data to be transferred between the device and the host which causes more lag.

  I've added two options to the screencap which haven't been adopted by upstream yet. You can apply this patch to your source code to reduce the data size generated by screencap to reduce the transfer lag.

   $> cd frameworks/base/cmds/screencap
   $> patch -p3 < $PATH_TO_SEVENSQAURE/contributes/0001-Add-option-q-s-for-screencap-L/M/N.patch
   $> mm
   $> # Push new screencap to your device
  

  The original screencap outputs image in RGBA_8888 format, we add an option to convert it into RGB888/RGB565 to save transfer and compress time, which is already supported by current seven-square.

  New options:

  -q: quality preferred, will convert to RGB888. - 25% size reduced.
  -s: speed preferred, will convert to RGB565.   - 50% size reduced.
  

Compile

Install dependences and just make:

$> apt-get install qt4-qmake libqt4-dev libqtcore4 libqtgui4
$> make

Run from source tree:

$> ./build/seven-square

System-wide install:

$> make install

Or you can create a shortcut on your desktop.

Keypad support

If you want to support to define more keys in the UI, please read the contributes/generate-keymap.sh for more info.

FAQ

Q: Can I connect to my device via the network and using seven-square? A: Yes. Just use 'adb connect ...' to connect your device before running seven-square, make sure you can see it via 'adb devices', and you can run 'adb shell ls'

Q: I noticed a lot of lag, can that be fixed? A: Try to follow the guideline in the 'Optional' section, which will help a bit on this issue.

History

'Seven Square' was a game I played when I was a child, and I wrote a QT version for it, in the branch sevensquare-game, [screenshot]:(screenshots/Screenshot-sq.png). And now it's the base code of this tool.

Author

Yang Hong yanghong@thundersoft.com

Copyright reserved.

Released under GPL2.

Contributors

Eric Wang, Helped to port to the Windows platform

Bug fixing:

Maks Verver

flutterbrony

Alexandre ZANNI

oesse79

References

• Android screencast (Java)

  http://code.google.com/p/androidscreencast/

• Droid@Screen (Java)

  http://blog.ribomation.com/droid-at-screen/