Check the blog for a longer explanation, but Android pissed me off.
Granted, it was Amazon's hacked up Android on a Fire HD. But the experience was frustrating and shitty. Perhaps dropping $500 on a high-end Samsung tablet would be better, but that's halfway to an AIM or Race-Tech Dash2 Pro, which is best.
But I had a pile of Pi 3's just laying around (sixteen, actually), so I figured I'd give it a shot. As a low cost way to prototype, it's magnificent. I'm looking at other single board computers with more gonads as possibilities for an upgrade if this survives this weekend. Though, with the amount of time I've put into this mess, a CANBUS connected bespoke race dash would have been a better value. Maybe. The Dash2 I tried initially worked, but just couldn't get enough channels out of the ECUGN over CANBUS to do what I wanted.
But if I'd done that, I couldn't have made a cool video and claimed I made an eDash out of shit I had laying around. The burn-in you see at the end of the video when the thing shuts off showing Adele is left over from the screen's previous life as a media station for the stereo on my back porch. I think Adele was the graphic on the display for something like 16 months straight. And now I get to see her every time it powers down. Oops.
The thing is, I can pull the SD card out of this unit and shove it in a new Pi 4 and get double the performance with zero additional work. So the load time goes from 38 seconds to 19 seconds, and there's enough horsepower left to do some other crap, like run a Nav app or some kind of in-car audio thing. And this setup is a cellular modem away from live streaming telemetry off the car to the mothership like an F1 car. That has limited actual value, but huge nerd points. Other SBC's offer even better performance, though at a premium. The difference between a $35 SBC like the Pi and a $150 SBC like an Edge-V is HUGE.