Embedded Sbc

By Author: vestatech
Total Articles: 1
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When it comes toembedded SBC products, there are several stages of design, as follows.

Great idea! But it needs some work.
This is when you first hit on that brilliant concept, and you're pumped and ready to go, but eventually a colleague calms you down a bit and notes that your initial design or prototype could use a little polishing.

Hmm, not quite, but better.
After you calm down a bit and take another look at your design, you can start to see the obvious weak spots, what needs improving, what was perfect from the get go, and what just plain needs to be thrown away, so you start banging it into shape with another draft of the design.

Well it's getting there
You've made some calculated improvements on your SBC board concept, you've got it to where it's almost ready to go into production, until

Oh no, that's all wrong!
You ask for some advice on the design and get more criticism than you bargained for. Back to the drawing board. Aaaand, there are ...
... about twenty five more steps in the design process, all along the lines of design, test, design, test, design, test, so we'll skip them and get right to

Perfect! Send in an order for X amount of these!
Finally, after perhaps several months of tinkering and retooling, you've got the design for an SBC you'd be proud to put in any electronic product.
If you're lucky, you can avoid step 27, which is to read all of your customer reviews and realize that you totally missed a very obvious shortcoming.

This is just the way it is with embedded system technology. Once your product is out there, it's out there. When Microsoft put out the Xbox and a bunch of them overheated, they had customers send in their broken Xboxes so they could replace the faulty mezzanine cards with new ones that worked quite a bit better. This sort of thing is easy when you're working on a motherboard based computer. But when that's not an option, you really need to do everything in your power to get it right the first time before you spend half the budget on those custom arm7 units.

One way to really aid the design process is to work very closely with the people making your SBC boards. These companies are out to get your business and support, and by shopping around and seeing what they can offer you for a good deal, or even some input on some great ways to make the actual production of the SBCs' quicker, cheaper, and easier, you'll be drawing on your potential-new-business-partner's expertise (as well as their eagerness to make you happy and earn a new client).

Whatever you do, just remember single board computers are probably the only thing where perfectionism has to be not just an ideal, but a real and tangible goal. If you're making something more flexible and customizable, you can afford to release a product that's Pretty darn good and then work it out later on down the road by offering updates and upgrades to the user. With single board computers, once you put in that order, you'd better be happy with what you're getting, so don't be afraid to be incredibly picky.

Vesta Technology offers both custom and standard 32 bit microcontrollers and embedded operating systems for industry and commercial applications. VestaTech.com embedded rtos, motor control icrocontroller, and advanced mezzanine card have been used in data acquisition and monitoring products in industries including agriculture, medical, food processing, semiconductor equipment, and robotics. For non standard products, VestaTech.com offers a custom carrier board and a custom single board computer.