Published 24-03-2020
| Article appears in April Issue

ADLINK delivers faster prototyping with Industrial-Pi SMARC development kit

24-03-2020

A new industrial-ready prototyping platform gives engineers a low-cost way to develop potential products, with capability to experiment with peripherals and sensors, thanks to leading edge computing firm ADLINK Technology. Suitable for work or home, the kit features an industrial-grade smart mobility architecture (SMARC) module that is backed by ADLINK change control process.

The kit is designed to facilitate ‘dropping’ into an industrial solution as-is, a major benefit over the popular Arduino and Raspberry Pi (RPi) platforms.

Features of the kit include an I-Pi carrier board, a LEC-PX30 SMARC module and a transparent acrylic shielding to balance protection and power supply accessibility. The kit also includes a USB programming cable and an SD memory card with Linux OS.

 “ADLINK’s I-Pi SMARC development kit supports a variety of deployment scenarios,” said Henri Parmentier, ADLINK´s product manager for SMARC and Q7 product lines. He said the kit allows “engineers who have already created prototypes using Arduino or RPi platforms to leverage those ecosystems and libraries, and quickly and easily migrate their designs into a long-lived, revision-controlled, industrial production environment.”

The kit features an Intel hardware abstraction layer (HAL), called MRAA. This enables the operating system kernel to interact with hardware in a general way, instead of at a detailed hardware level. This reduces or eliminates the need for changes when kernel-mode code is run on different hardware platforms. MRAA simplifies the logic for connecting to different sensor pins, and supports Arduino and RPi platforms, C++, Python, JavaScript and Java.

In addition, the kit also comes with an Intel software repository, called useful packages and modules (UPM) that features software drivers suitable for a wide variety of popular sensors and actuators that are also available for Arduino and RPi platforms.

A major issue for development of commercial platforms is lifecycle management. A frequently encountered problem with other kits is hardware changes without substitutions being conveyed to end users. Not a problem with ADLINK. Whenever a component or process is changed on an ADLINK SMARC module, it is announced by an industry-standard engineering change notice (ECN) and process change notice (PCN) practices at least six months before implementation.

ADLINK also boasts 10-year availability, after sales support and return merchandise authorisation (RMA), and reporting and debugging on production quality issues.

ADLINK
https://ipi.wiki/

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