Due to some major setbacks and other life events (on both of our parts) we have been unable to really work on the project again until more recently. The largest setback by far, is that a second Rock2Square failed, the video output on it decided one day to start artifacting HORRIBLY. So we have decided, that despite its excellent specs, its really not up to the task for several reasons:

1. Powering the device, though not really an issue, is apparently an area that is weak. (First failure)

2. The second failure (video issue) just kills any remaining confidence that we have in it. And trying to get the touchscreen working was apparently IMPOSSIBLE with android (not really, just we don't have the kind of time and insane amount of background knowledge to continue to attempt)

3. We still didn't "stress" test it, in the environment that it will be in (a car), and if the previous failures are any indication of what we would be possibly dealing with.... well, NO. We are in a pretty harsh environment anyway, and keeping this thing in a car just makes it even worse. We live in Central NY, temp range in a car is anywhere between -15F to 125F, if not more.

So, on to the news:

There were 2 additional purchases for this project, the first was the CubieBoard2 and a 7inch touchscreen and accessory kit. This worked well for some stuff, but the touchscreen working with Android, once again was seemingly impossible, and with better support than the Rock2, we were honestly hoping for better. The Cubieboard2 did have a lot of nice accessories with the pack we got, and honestly if we were using linux, it would probably have been okay. The other big setback was the GPIO pins working in a way that would suit our needs.

The second purchase was the ODROID XU4, its companion 7inch touchscreen, and some accessories. This touchscreen setup worked ALMOST out of the box, Very impressive. Joel was able to get it working on the inside of a few hours to what we needed. So far the accessories we picked up worked perfectly, and the Android version is more up to date than ANY of the products we've tried so far. The only thing that has not really been tackled yet is the GPIO, and I'll be doing more of that when I order mine. One of the accessories we picked up was a little button board with some LEDs on it. This works pretty well, but there is some lag that concerns us a bit, but hopefully tapping off the additional GPIO we can get better response times. Really all we need on the GPIO is either connect an Arduino and have it do the buttons and rotary encoder, or to run the 6 buttons and rotary encoder directly.