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What exactly IS an "Embedded PC" and what are its
advantages?
We've all gotten used to the various forms of PC -- palmtop, laptop,
desktop. But "embedded"? What the heck is that? Turns out they are very
common things, and you've probably used them without even realizing it. An
embedded PC is simply a tiny, rugged PC that is meant to be installed
inside an instrument. Agilent uses them inside its oscilloscopes and other
products that have built-in displays. Many point-of-sale terminals have
embedded PCs in them.
We have chosen Advantech Corporation to provide our embedded PC.
Advantech products have wide acceptance in the world, and the quality,
feature set, price and support are very good. Although the company is
based in Taiwan, they have American Sales Reps and support personnel. We
have not had trouble getting excellent and timely support. If you have a
problem with the embedded PC in your Sienna, we provide support to you
directly, but it should be reassuring to know that we in turn can rely on
the expert assistance from the Sales Reps and Application Engineers at
Advantech.
See the detailed info page for
pictures of the Embedded PC and MIO board that we offer.
Embedded PCs have these advantages over laptops and desktops:
1. They have a much smaller Operating System kernel. Terminals
that are designed to insulate the user from the O/S often use Linux.
Others, such as oscilloscopes, use Windows XP. The smaller kernel takes up
less space on the disk, so small Compact Flash cards can be used instead
of hard drives. However, the O/S is still fully compatible with all the
applications you know and love. The embedded PC in the Sienna can be
loaded with either XP or Linux. Vista will be available eventually, but we
expect XP to be in use for quite some time, simply because so many people
are using it and it is a very good, stable O/S.
2. Embedded PCs do not require a shutdown when power is removed.
You know how long it takes to do a shutdown as Windows closes all of its
open applications. But in an instrument, you often can't wait, or you are
using it in a hostile environment in which power could be removed at any
time. You also can't afford to wait for a disk check operation when power is
restored. Now, laptops do not suffer from this as badly as desktops, since
they can simply be left on with the cover closed as they are moved from
place to place. But laptops are usually more expensive than desktops too.
3. Because the embedded PC is inside the instrument, its wiring and
power connections are all done for you. You don't have to lug around
the power cord and interface boxes or cables when you move from place to
place. The only thing you would have to take with you are the keyboard,
mouse and monitor. Now you might say, "But wait! With a laptop that's all
built in." And you'd be right, but you would still have to take any boxes
along, such as sound card interface boxes and cables. And laptops are also
less affordable for many people.
4. Choice of screen size. As with a desktop, you get to choose
how large an external monitor you use. Although you can plug one into a
laptop, you typically don't. When you plug a monitor into the Sienna, it
can be a widescreen Plasma HDTV if you want! In fact, because the Sienna
has an option for a MIO board, you can actually have two video displays at
the same time - the standard high resolution VGA, and the even higher
resolution DVI.
5. Backups and virus protection are not necessary. Although you could use the O/S inside the Sienna as your primary
home PC, and use it to do your taxes, surf the web, and do pretty much
anything you would do with a regular PC, you typically won't want to do
this. For one thing, the size of the Compact Flash card (8GB max)
precludes storing a lot of stuff (although you can easily add an external
USB flash or hard drive or even install a 2.5" laptop hard drive inside
the Sienna). But mainly, your Sienna is intended to run ham applications.
By not using it as your main PC, you do not have to worry about virus
protection, theft or loss of data. If something happens to the Compact
Flash card with the O/S on it, you can simply call us and we'll send you a
replacement card. If it's out of warranty, the cost to replace the card is
about $100. We do recommend that you back up any data files that you store
in the Sienna. This is really easy to do, too! As we just mentioned, you
can plug a flash disk into the USB port and copy files quickly. You can
also use the built-in Ethernet networking to make the Sienna look like
just another PC on your home network and you can then simply drag and drop
files from your Sienna to your backup drives.
6. The hardware platform of an embedded PC is very stable. They
do not go obsolete as fast as desktop PCs because they are sold by the
thousands to companies like DZKit and installed in products that need to
be around for a long time. Since they are small and completely
self-contained (sound card, I/O ports and everything on one little card),
they are easy to upgrade too. You can access the SODIMM memory from the
bottom of the Sienna by removing a cover plate, and you can pop the
Compact Flash card out from the back panel, so these are easily upgraded
as newer, larger memories become available.
7. Because they are dedicated to a given application, the speed of
the processor is not critical. We offer two models - a Celeron at
600MHz and a Pentium at 1.4GHz. Even the DSP application software we
install (SiliconPixels' ChromaSound) runs just fine on the lower speed
CPU. You can buy bigger, faster CPUs for desktop and laptop PCs, but the
performance is not necessary to run the typical ham radio application
software, so there's no need to have the biggest, fastest CPU.
And one final word about the embedded PC in the Sienna:
The Sienna does not depend on the PC. Some other manufacturers
who sell radios with embedded PCs rely on the PC to do all of the work.
With the Sienna, we believe that you prefer to use the PC to augment the
radio, not to BE the radio. As a result, if you aren't planning to use the
PC for digital modes, logbooks, contest dupe-checking, mic processing, or
DSP, you don't have to wait for it to boot in order to use your rig. The
radio is controlled from its own dual Atmel Mega324P microprocessors with
firmware that we've factory installed (and that you can update yourself).
You control the radio by using front panel knobs, buttons and switches,
not by clicking the mouse. Of course you can run any of the popular rig
control applications right on the rig if you want to. |
