My CF application and the platform it targets

Tue, August 10, 2004, 03:29 PM under MobileAndEmbedded
I work for a Building Management Systems (BMS) manufacturing company. Our main products are intelligent building controls. In January we replaced our old network display panel with a new hardware platform running Windows CE 4.2. The product's name is IQView.

Our hardware is based on an XScale PXA255 processor 200 MHz with 32 MB RAM. There is no stylus/keyboard/mouse, so user interaction is via 1/4VGA color touchscreen using a finger :-) Connectivity includes rs232, Ethernet and our own proprietary current loop. The unit is always connected to one of the previous options. It can be panel mounted or fixed to the wall (either way this is not a mobile device). In summary, it also has an SD card slot, LED, buzzer and relay output.

IQView allows for discovery of controllers, navigation of modules within them and adjustment of parameters, graphing, alarm reception etc. The application itself is written by myself using .NET CF. This is effectively (not literally) the only process running on the system and the only GUI that the end user interacts with - there are no OS components (control panel applets, taskbar, menus etc) ever visible. It runs 24x7 (assuming none of my bugs creep up :-).

If you want to know more about our choice of CE over other operating systems, our choice of the CF over eVC or want to see an image of the product, then you may find this article [pdf , html] useful. It appeared in EmbeddedSystemsEurope in April and includes quotes from our technology and business managers - us devs never get air time like that :-[

Other references to IQView on the web are
here (Swedish)
here (Finnish)
here (French)
here (German)
here, here, here (English)