James Gatt

Student Developer, AOSP Engineer

James Gatt is an AOSP Engineer based in Malta, currently pursuing an MSc in Microelectronics and Microsystems. He is the founder of the PixelBuilds custom ROM distribution and has recently expanded his expertise into Android app development using Kotlin and Jetpack Compose. With a BSc in Computer Engineering from the University of Malta, James also specializes in Embedded systems and practical IoT applications.

I Put Android in Charge of My Fish Tank (What Could Go Wrong?)

Keeping fish alive is stressful, but what if Android handled the life support?

This session dives into a smart aquarium that collects sensor data, manages climate control, identifies fish via computer vision, and evaluates water toxicity using an on-device LLM, all driven by a native Android app.

Maintaining optimal aquatic conditions is high-stakes.
Tracking temperature, pH, conductivity, and turbidity lays the foundation for hardware automation. It’s a practical case study bridging raw hardware, scalable architecture, Edge AI, and delightful UI.

This session covers:
• Architecture: Interfacing sensors via MQTT and a Firebase backend.
• UI Polish: Pushing Jetpack Compose Canvas to build an interactive 2D digital twin.
• Climate Control: Securely managing high-voltage heaters and DC fans.
• ML & Edge AI: Deploying live fish identification and a 1.35GB Google Gemma LLM via MediaPipe for real-time telemetry analysis.

And voilà, the fish keep swimming!