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Quickstart: Your First Emulator

This guide walks you through launching a cloud Android Automotive emulator from the web portal and interacting with it in your browser. It takes about five minutes.

Prerequisites​

  • A Null Autos account in your organization's tenant. If you do not have one yet, see Onboarding or ask your tenant admin to invite you.
  • A modern browser (Chrome, Edge, or Firefox). Device video streams over WebRTC, which all current browsers support.

1. Sign in to the portal​

Open your organization's portal and sign in. Null Autos uses single sign-on (SSO), so you log in with your organization's identity provider or your Null Autos credentials.

After signing in you land on the Home dashboard, which shows live counts of your emulators, snapshots, and available storage.

2. Launch an emulator​

  1. In the left navigation, click the devices icon (a phone and tablet) to open the Emulators page.
  2. Click Create in the upper right.
  3. Pick a snapshot to launch from. A snapshot is a pre-built Android Automotive disk image that your platform team publishes from CI builds. See Snapshots to learn more.
  4. Optionally give the emulator a display name and assign it to one or more groups (groups control who can see and use it).
  5. Click Create.

The emulator moves through a short lifecycle, from provisioning to running, as the platform clones the snapshot, schedules the device, and waits for it to boot. This usually completes in well under a couple of minutes.

3. Connect to the device​

Once the status is running, open the emulator. The portal establishes a live WebRTC connection to the device, so you can:

  • See and touch the screen, clicking, dragging, and typing just like a real head unit.
  • Use multiple displays, for example IVI plus instrument cluster, where the image provides them.
  • Open the device controls for rotation, microphone, Bluetooth, and GPS location.

See Connecting to Emulators for the full tour.

4. Use ADB and the shell​

You can run Android Debug Bridge (adb) commands against the device directly in the browser via the ADB panel, or from your terminal with the nullctl adb connect command:

nullctl adb connect <emulator-id>
# then, in another terminal:
adb shell
adb logcat

Note that the browser's ADB panel is already a shell on the device — there you run commands directly (for example logcat, not adb logcat). The adb prefix only applies from your own terminal after connecting.

5. Drive the vehicle hardware (VHAL)​

Because these are Android Automotive devices, you can inspect and change the Vehicle HAL (VHAL) properties, including speed, gear, fuel and battery, HVAC, and doors, from the VHAL inspector in the portal. This lets you simulate vehicle states without a real car. See the VHAL guide.

6. View logs​

Open the Logs panel to stream the emulator's logs live. Logs are delivered as a real-time stream, so you see output as it happens.

7. Clean up​

When you are done, Delete the emulator from the portal (or nullctl delete emulator <id>). This tears down the device and frees its storage. Each user has a limited number of concurrent emulators, so cleaning up keeps capacity available for your team.

Next steps​