The BBB offers a wide variety of hardware features, and the particular features that you use in your projects will vary as you change the capes and overlays used within your system. While this gives you a lot of flexibility during prototyping, you might eventually reach a point where you will finalize your custom hardware design to a single, static configuration and decide to make it a permanent Android-based solution.

The examples in this book make the design decision of having apps directly access the hardware of the BBB. While this approach makes creating hardware-interfacing Android apps simple, it is not an ideal approach. Once you have a hardware design that you like and software that properly interfaces with the hardware, it is time to fully integrate your solution with Android. Depending upon just how complex your hardware solution is, you might end up creating custom kernel device drivers, or even modifying the managers within the Android OS...