There’s a thought-provoking post on GeekTillItHurts on how Android 7.0 Nougat can be run on the Raspberry Pi 3 . This offers new opportunities for entrepreneurs and developers to implement more single board computer (SBC) embedded type applications.
Using Android on SBCs isn’t new. I have worked on a few such projects that have re-purposed media Android TV devices to do more specialised things. It’s very easy to program Android rather than c++ or c and you get much better productivity. It also allows more complex applications to be implemented quicker. In two cases I ended up doing image processing on SBCs that would have been much more difficult, if not impossible, had I not had Android’s hardware accelerated drawing APIs.
These boards often run ‘headless’ without a UI or with a minimal admin UI. In these cases, you need some central event processing for communication between the various modules. I have found using Green Robot’s EventBus simplifies communication between threads, services and the minimal UI if you have one.