Connect Eclipse to Android emulator on a different machine

Question

Can't seem to find the following information although I'm pretty sure this should be possible: I'm running an Android emulator on a machine A. I'm developing on another machine B in which I'm using Eclipse.

Now when I switch to the DDMS perspective in Eclipse, I want the emulator from machine A to show up in the devices tab.

The reason is, that the emulator is quite slow and it looks like running development and emulator on different machines might be a solution.

Since the emulator runs on a specific port, I'm pretty sure I just need to figure out how to tell eclipse where to look for emulators.

Thanks for any tips

Answer 1

You can tell adb to connect to a device listening on an IP address and TCP port. That device should then show up in eclipse. So the debug machine is easy.

The emulator machine may be harder. The emulator is listening for TCP connection on a local port. IIRC it has been established that there's no command line switch to make it listen on an external interface, though double check that. So you might have to modify and recompile the emulator, or use some kind of port-forwarder on the hosting machine. ssh might handle that for you though I'm sure there are other tools without the encryption overhead if that's not needed.