CODEWITHSUNDEEP
androidpythonlinuxtabletubuntu-touch
bosnjak
bosnjak

Reputation: 8614

Tablet development for a dedicated system

I need to make an architectural decision for developing (actually porting) my embedded solution. I will try to present my case as clearly as possible, and any advice I can get will be appreciated.

Introduction

I have an embedded system, currently developed on ARM11 architecture and ArchLinux OS. It is implemented using all kinds of technologies available under Linux, including C, C++, Bash and Python.

At this time, I would like to port my solution to a tablet, so I am trying to make some decisions about the architecture, based on the requirements of my system.

Requirements

The system is modular, and it runs multiple processes and threads. It also communicates to remote servers and controls the hardware peripherals. These are the basic requirements, at the moment, I will update as discussion develops:

Primary:

Other:

My questions

My investigation so far

My investigation so far has been concentrated on the OS choice. The main options seem to be Android and Ubuntu Touch. Here are my thoughts:

Android

Android wins in the mainstream category obviously, but...

I have no experience of Android development, but as far as I can tell, I can either develop a Java application that runs on top of Dalvik, or I can go native via Android NDK. Maybe I can even bypass the whole thing and go native side-by-side of Dalvik, and develop in Python? I guess then I will lose the access to the API for HW access. Not sure how I would access the HW then. But if I go with Java development, this is a sandbox solution, and I am not sure if I can have such a control over the processes, HW and CPU core affinity?

Ubuntu Touch

Developing on Ubuntu Touch would be more like Linux development I am used to, since it uses Qt. The issue here is that the applications are developed using the SDK that restricts me to HTML5 and QML, which I'm not sure can allow me the same control over the system I need. If I use Python and avoid the SDK, same issue arises - how do I control the HW? Of course, there is a way to do it like on a regular embedded system I guess, but I don't want to reinvent the wheel if I don't have to.

Also, it seems that Ubuntu Touch hasn't been ported to many devices yet, only a handful of them are supported.

Finally

I am not sure how well I have presented my case, but I will update the question as needed with further explanations and requirement details. Thank you for your patience, your time and any help you may offer.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 211

Answers (1)

Vlad
Vlad

Reputation: 9481

I am in the same boat as you, we are developing embedded system on ARM CPU. Currently the system is written in Python on custom built linux distro from hardware vendor.

We have been looking at Android and Ubuntu Touch for a few months. So far we didn't get any decision yet. But here what we found out from our incomplete analysis:

  1. Android is quite heavy system, that also brings JVM into the mix. So you HW and memory requirements will significantly increase.

  2. Android likes to take over the entire system, so sometimes you might be fighting with Android.

  3. Android has very good IPC mechanisms, not available on mainstream linux kernel, such as Binder. Of course you can port it to another system. But this would be considerable effort.

  4. Android has very rich GUI interface, also with things like NDK view you are not confined into the JDK box.

  5. Android doesn't use standard GNU C library, it uses something called BioniC which is a port of C library from BSD. Usually it is not a problem for most software, but if you are using some linux specific low level features, like working with serial ports you will need to tweak your code. See what I had to do to port Java RXTX library to android https://github.com/vladistan/gnu.io.android

  6. You can find a lot of Android developers out there who will do basic GUI programming for you, while you are concentrating on your app specific stuff. Interfacing between GUI and low level things is quite easy using binder. And of course you can bring in whatever mecahnism you want via NDK.

We have considered Ubuntu Touch. But so far it doesn't seem to be mature enough.

Upvotes: 1

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