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Ask Slashdot: Which OS For an Embedded Display Unit?
First time accepted submitter spouse writes "We are a small Software Design team of 8 developers, working with home brewed Linux to make our ARM7, ARM9 and Intel based embedded products work. Now we want to develop our first 7 inch touch screen tablet-like device serving as control panel for a set of our 'black box' devices. We see Android as a possible choice due to the tablet like character of our applications. We will need App management and the GUI elements. We do not need all the apps out there in the store, we do not need any telephone/sms/email/webbrowser support. Will we end with modifying Android just as much as our own Linux derivate to make things work? Does it make sense to build the hardware of the touch panel based on google reference design to minimize the effort? Are there any experiences out there? Who has done that before and what are the experiences of that? How hard is it to make a product really work with Android? What is the right choice here? Shall we try?"
... the hell would you invest engineering resources in building a "tablet like" device that's going to be a proprietary frontend for wherever your real magic is taking place? Android is a great choice, given your requirements list, but for God's sake call one of the 5,000,000 companies in China that make tablets from $50 to $300 and ask them to ship you a crateful. Go to CES next year and walk the small booths - you will not be able to walk under the weight of business cards from companies like this. FCC approvals, full BSPs done for you already, available ex stock FOB Shenzen.
If any commercial 7" tablet fits your needs, check some brands/models out there and create a custom version of Android + your app. If it doesn't (probably not rugged enough, or the touch screen not bulletproof....) get them, strip them and modify them. If you are planning to sell more than 100k units and you have enough $, get serious, contact a factory and ask for some redesign for you. In both cases, you can use a stripped android + your app. OR you can start with something like this: http://www.geek.com/articles/gadgets/get-your-own-open-source-touchscreen-device-for-69-2011023/
Having some experience in this area my suggestion is to use off the shelf hardware if you at all can. For most of these specific market "black box" control applications you'll never sell enough to bring the cost low enough to do a ground-up design at a reasonable price, plus it locks you in to the current state of capabilities. It will be much more cost effective to use existing Android tablets, write an app for them to do your control and talk back to your black box over a network (a private network if you must). This will allow you much more flexibility than linking the control interface directly with the black box. In the pro a/v and automation category where I do some of this work almost everything has gone this direction and it makes it much easier and faster to design/upgrade.
Agreed. We did an in house design of one and just the engineering costs added about $500 to each unit when spread out over 30,000 units. We most likely will not sell that many but it's a goal and the figure used to do costing. We used our own in house code which is very mature. We're going with an already made and industry certified ( we need too many certs but this means we only have to pay to get it certified for shipboard use) Atom processor based touch screen which is larger, has more features and is about 10x faster than our in house design. Since there are at least 10 vendors of similar products we won't be locked into the architecture of the in house design, porting the firmware will not add to much cost and these are *less* money than our in house design if engineering costs for the final product are figured in.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
how many of those 47,826 vendors ships source code? have you any fucking idea how hard it is to get these companies to fucking well understand the GPL, dickhead? i've been dealing with these companies for eighteen fucking months, and they just don't give a flying fuck. not to mention the simple fact that they themselves are supplied with GPL-violating binary-only distributions, they have absolutely no software expertise whatsoever; their ODM software suppliers can't keep hold of their own developers because the supply of software engineers in China is so in demand.
it takes about three to four months of careful negotiation, with about a 1% hit rate (i.e. 99% of them don't understand english except phrases like "the money has been transferred" and "we want to order XX,XXX units", and those that do understand don't give a shit) we've found THREE suppliers who comprehend the GPL, and that was only after explaining it to them. of those two suppliers, one STILL doesn't give a shit, one of them was so terrified of the consequences that they terminated sales of the product, and the other one is, thank god, still in the running, is willing to work with us and we will supply their next software *for* them. ... but that was after 18 months to 2 years of searching. now, are you _seriously_ suggesting to these guys that they spend allll their time and money doing exactly the same thing? i think you'll find that they're better off actually designing their own hardware and writing their own software.
anyway, to answer the actual question: use openembedded to custom-build an angstrom linux distro. it's been around for over 10 years, now, so is a pretty mature development platform, and has some superb recipes. ask on the openembedded lists or irc, be patient and you'll get the advice you seek.