Android emulator device not showing in Running Devices

Sometimes with the android virtual device running, I can’t seem to see them under the Running Devices when I click “run app”. To solve that, I need to restart my adb. To do that go to the “Android SDK/platform-tools” folder. In my case for Mac OS X, it is at:

/Users/my_user_name/Library/Android/sdk/platform-tools

From there I need to run the following command:

./adb kill-server
./adb start-server

Then you can check whether the device has been attached by:

./adb devices

Android Emulator is not running

I tried to download and play around with Android SDK. So I followed the steps given in this link. It worked fine, then I tried to do the Hello World tutorial. However, when I clicked run->run, nothing happens.

It turns out that the emulator is not running. When I tried to run the emulator from Eclipse, by clicking Window->Android SDK and AVD manager, and create a new virtual device, and click “start”, it gives an error that says: emulator: ERROR: unknown virtual device name:’my_avd’

After I google the internet, I found out that the solution is to set the path to the Android SDK home. The reason is that sometimes the emulator is looking for a profile directory at a different location. So I set my environment variable ANDROID_SDK_HOME to the .android folder in my drive. And it all sets. The solution is given also in this link.