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?"

Use off the shelf hardware for control if you can

[BenFranske]

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.

Re:Use off the shelf hardware for control if you c

[mrmeval]

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.

Re:But why...?

[AmiMoJo]

We should have done that with out latest project, but instead went with a custom device running Windows Embedded Compact 7 (WinCE 7). Support is a joke, sound recording and GPIOs don't seem to work, Silverlight performance is pathetic and makes it utterly useless... We have reached the point where we are writing our own UI using OpenGL, even having to do our own gestures for the touch screen.

We should have picked Android. You get a good UI library for free, which on its own is worth a lot.