Contraption is my project to create a GNU-based software overlay on top of Android for the Beagle Board. It simplifies porting traditional GNU-based code to a platform that otherwise omits the usual GNU infrastructure. It is definitely a work in progress, but I've had some success in porting tools like busybox, bash, strace, and dropbear (ssh/scp), as well as my Diminuto library and toolkit. I've gotten all of this working using dynamic linking by hosting the necessary shared objects from the Code Sourcery tool chain in the root file system. Traditional Linux developers may cheer. Android developers are probably appalled.

The distribution is mostly just a Makefile that builds stock software packages downloaded from various web sites then builds an SD card that will boot on the Beagle Board. The Makefile has comments identifying the URLs from where I downloaded the various source distributions.

You can find a tarball of the Contraption distribution here.

Here are blog articles that my alter-ego, Chip Overclock, has written about Contraption:

• Android and Contraption  
• Co habiting with Android on the Beagle Board  
• Memory Mapped Devices on the Beagle Board with Android  
• The System & The System: Overlaying GNU on Android on the Beagle Board 
• Getting to Hello World on Android in About Five Minutes
• Contraption and Horsefly: Beagle Board, Android, AR.drone
• Android FroYo on the BeagleBoard xM Rev C