Start/stop capture, writes to the sdcard by default:

View packet dump stream:

View contents of an individual packet:

So I downloaded a version of VICE for my desktop system. That has a much richer set of controls, one of which is creating and attaching a fresh image (it’s a ‘file’ menu item). I figured if I was lucky the image created with VICE would work to at least get me started on Frodo on my device. And lucky me, yes it does! Actually, now I can push the d64 images back and forth, use the emulator on my desktop to do a little poking around and push the file over to my device to take with me. Very nice! Just remember, save with replace is ‘SAVE “@0:FILENAME”,8′. Otherwise an attempt to overwrite a file will just silently fail. Ahhh, nostalgic.

The application interface itself is pretty simple. When it first loads up you won’t have any interpreters besides shell. If you go into the View menu, select interpreters, and then select Add from the menu under there you can add other interpreters. The interpreters generally come with example scripts, which will show up in the main list view once they’re loaded:

There’s a preferences screen, which covers mostly visual options:

If you long press on a script you have an option to edit it:

The editor that comes up is just a simple but effective textbox, so at least you can edit scripts in place on the device:

And then you can run a script, in this place displaying a toast message over the keyboard when I run the hello world program:

• Handle intents
• Start activities
• Make phone calls
• Send text messages
• Scan bar codes
• Poll location and sensor data
• Use text-to-speech

public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
    super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
    WebView webview = new WebView(this);
    webview.getSettings().setJavaScriptEnabled(true);
    webview.setWebViewClient(new WebViewClient() {
        @Override public boolean shouldOverrideUrlLoading(WebView view, String url) {
            view.loadUrl(url);
    	    return true;
    	}
    });
    webview.loadUrl("http://google.com");
    setContentView(webview);
}

However, if you follow a link to an image it downloads instead of opens in the view. That’s the same thing the built in browser does, but wasn’t the behavior I expected. I’ll have to figure out how to handle that a bit better.

• Install Wireshark
• Follow the instructions in the readme to also install the ChmodBPF script
• Under Sharing area of the OS X settings app configure your system to use an ethernet connection and share it out to wifi clients
• Now configure your device to connect to the wifi network provided by your system, test to make sure it works
• Startup Wireshark and set it to capture traffic (wifi is en1 on MacBook Pro systems, what I normally use)

And that’s it, you should now get quite readable dumps of what applications are doing to communicate. Lots of interesting things you can learn digging into how folks structure their client/server interaction.

1. Follow the instructions to download and build Android from source. Follow the whole thing (I had to create a case-sensitive disk image and all), including the actual build step. Otherwise you won’t have the libraries necessary and agcc will error out when you try to run it.
2. Add the prebuilt/darwin-x86/toolchain/arm-eabi-4.2.1/bin subdirectory of where ever you built the source to your PATH, add it to your .bash_profile if you want.
3. Download the agcc wrapper script, put it somewhere in your path, and make it executable.

Now you should be ready to compile a program and download it to your phone. This was my test app:

#include <stdio.h>

int main( int argc, char **argv ) {
  printf("Hello from Droid Hacks!\n");
  return 0;
}

And you should be able to compile it with “agcc hello.c -o hello” and end up with a hello executable:

~ > agcc hello.c -o hello
~ > file hello
hello: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, ARM, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked (uses shared libs), not stripped
~ >

And you can move the file across to the phone and run it. You’ll have to make a directory to push it into. The sdcard is marked as noexec, so you can’t run stuff from there. And the data directory has more restrictive permissions. So you’ll have to su and create a directory on the data partition, and relax the perms on that directory:

~ > adb shell
$ su
# mkdir /data/droidtest
# chmod 777 /data/droidtest
# exit
$ exit
~ > adb push hello /data/droidtest
418 KB/s (6747 bytes in 0.015s)
~ > adb shell
$ cd /data/droidtest
$ ls -l
-rwxrwxrwx shell    shell        6747 2009-05-27 08:56 hello
$ ./hello
Hello from Droid Hacks!
$

And of course you can run the same thing from the terminal on your device as well: