Building Brillo-iant devices with Weave for a Connected world

October 27, 2015


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Posted by Gayathri Rajan & Ryan Cairns

Earlier this year at Google I/O, we previewed Brillo and Weave, our complete solution for building connected devices. Since May, we’ve opened up the Brillo operating system (OS) and Weave communication platform to early access partners. Today, we’re extending this to the broader developer community as part of our invite program. Read on to find out how you can receive an invitation.

Brillo brings the simplicity and speed of software development to hardware by offering you a lightweight embedded OS based on Android, core services, a developer kit, and a developer console. You can choose from a variety of hardware capabilities and customization options, quickly move from prototype to production, and manage at scale with over the air (OTA) updates, metrics, and crash reporting.


Watch this video to learn more about Brillo:



Once you’ve built your connected device, you’ll need to find a way for it to communicate with other devices and allow users to interact with it. That’s where Weave comes in. With Weave, you can build interoperable communications directly into your devices. Weave provides a messaging service that enables phones and devices to talk to each other locally and remotely through the cloud. The Weave cloud server handles remote communication and access to your web-connected device, safely and at scale. With Weave you also get a set of services to securely set up the device and provide controlled access. Additionally, Weave works seamlessly with, and is actually built right into, Brillo; but, you can also use Weave libraries with your existing Linux-based OS.


Check out this video we created to help you understand the power of Weave:



Weave comes with a mobile SDK for both iOS and Android, so that you can build apps to control and enhance the connected device experience for mobile users. If you’re an app developer interested in extending the reach of your apps to the physical world of devices, you can use Weave mobile and web APIs to control multiple Weave devices across brands in a single app.

Both Brillo and Weave are open, extensible, and secure by default to support a variety of devices and use cases. Brillo and Weave provide the platform, tools and services, so you can do what you do best: build great device and app experiences.

In addition to the Brillo and Weave platforms, we’re also unveiling our Weave compatibility program to ship certified Weave-branded devices as well as a hardware program for silicon vendors to build and sell Brillo-compliant hardware.

If you’d like to be part of our developer invite program, visit our website and request an invite. We’ll send you more details as well as access to our code, documentation and developer console. We look forward to making the Internet of Things better, together!