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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.
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.