Our customer approached us when faced with PC/104 hardware obsolescence. Furthermore it was becoming increasingly difficult for them to maintain their units in the field. Software updates to their application needed to be transferred to the PC/104 hardware by using a 3½FDD and replacement parallel ATA hard disk drives were difficult to find. The recently released QNX RTOS v4 2009 update opened up new possibilities with the release of new drivers and utilities.
Xpitec engineers identified the WAFER-945GSE3 from iEi Technology Corp. as a suitable hardware replacement. Based on the Intel® Atom™ N270, 1.6GHz Processor it was a suitable platform to enable the use of their existing discrete I/O and communication PC/104 modules. This kept hardware interfaces intact whilst providing new interfaces such as Serial ATA, USB, PS2 and support for dual display VGA+LVDS.
Xpitec engineers also developed a custom QNX RTOS v4 installer application which has simplified the update of application software in-field. Furthermore, complete system recovery is now possible in less than 2 minutes!
