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Development Support from Initiation to Production

Development Support from Initiation to Production

Eurotech Development Kits are an invaluable aid to the process of engineering software and hardware applications and have underpinned successful projects for Eurotech customers across a range of sectors, helping to speed the progress of products to market and ensuring that robust checks can be made at every development stage.

Building applications using a Development Kit that offers reliability, ease of use and a wide degree of flexibility can be an ideal route for OEM engineers needing to base a solution upon embedded devices. Through using a Eurotech Development Kit, the time required for application development can be dramatically reduced by cutting out the phases for developing the device driver programme, operating system and middleware. This can account for up to 30% of the total development cycle, offering opportunities for significant improvements in productivity.

Eurotech provides a wide variety of Development Kits, each combining the users selected target Eurotech hardware with, subject to availability, their choice of operating system taken from Windows CE, Wind River/Embedded Linux or Windows Embedded Standard (WES). These development systems utilise Eurotech single board computers based upon Intel® Atom™, x86 or ARM processors to provide an application-ready development environment, in other words one with image, drivers, OS and LCD all included. This means that users can immediately focus on deploying their value add expertise to a ‘known good’ base system, dramatically reducing the risks, costs and timescales associated with the provision of this element.

Development begins within minutes of opening the kit and the speed of progress to the prototype and production phases provides users with a major competitive advantage. A Eurotech Development Kit will also provide a robust and reliable point of reference throughout the whole life of the project.

Development Kits are capable of handling a wide range of engineering applications. Typical hardware features include:

Perspex base mounted with the users choice of SBC, Breakout and Audio Boards. Breakout Boards typically include a range of USB, Ethernet, GPIO and Serial Ports together with plug-ins for mouse and keyboard, where appropriate.
Hinged touch screen flat panel display (screen sizes vary with SBC choice) with touch screen stylus. This provision is optional, and may be omitted if the user wishes to use their own laptop or desktop monitor.
Mains power supply.
Power cord and range of required cabling.
Development Kit manual on DVDs.

Being remarkably compact and flexible, all Development Kits can be used conveniently on the desktop.

Support from beginning and beyond

OEM users of Eurotech Development Kits benefit from a fast track to advice and input from the Eurotech technical team. Registering for support provides a range of invaluable information and updates and each customer, once they move to production, has the option of having Eurotech preload their developed application image onto boards or systems prior to despatch, this process being managed by the issue of a unique customer part number. Tools exist to share images with Eurotech both for production purposes, but also where help is required with confirmation of performance and reliability through the project development. Using Development Kits can be an excellentmeans for customer engineers to achieve optimum results across a wide range of applications.

Success in the wind

Eurotech’s comprehensive ready-to-run development tools help customers like Natural Power to bring complex projects to rapid conclusion with Eurotech working closely with the customer to provide the highest degree of technical support at every project stage.

Natural Power, which provides consulting and risk management services for the global renewable energy industry, used the Eurotech ISIS Development Kit to develop its new generation ZephIR 300 Wind Lidar, a leading edge device for measuring wind speed and direction.

Using the Development Kit proved that the Eurotech ISIS SBC would provide the ideal high performance ultra-low power stable platform for the Wind Lidar. Alex Woodward of Natural Power explains: “Eurotech’s ISIS is at the heart of the ZephIR 300. The stable nature of the system ensures 100% availability of the Wind Lidar can be achieved while the low power draw maximises the run time of an external generator. The Intel® processor is capable of running the system’s processing algorithms in real time while simultaneously providing continuous monitoring of the internal components and live data to the user. The ISIS offeredhigh speed interfaces that ensured rapid and reliable data downloads, 2GB of Flash and also provided support for the latest technologies including Wi-Fi and 3G connections.