FROM
THE EDITOR
This week, Bryon Moyer brings us a look at the venerable VME and how it’s re-inventing itself to stay in sync with today’s more demanding design standards. While many may think of VME as a bit of a dinosaur, it actually has a lot of good, non-reptilian legs left and can continue to meet rigorous requirements for people who want to plug-and-play with a wide variety of industrial-strength subsystems. Our latest feature has the details.
Also this week, Daryl Miller, VP of engineering at Lantronix gives us a briefing on making embedded networks work. Networking is no longer a rare requirement in embedded design as just about everything these days includes at least some networking component. This latest contributed article explains.
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Kevin
Morris – Editor
Embedded Technology Journal
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Moving Data with VME
by Bryon Moyer, Embedded Technology Journal
There was a time when they could fill a huge stadium. They were the headliners. They were the go-to guys. And they had a good run. But, as is typical, upstarts made a grab for the spotlight, winning the attention of an audience eager for shiny new things. But this didn’t deter them, and they didn’t stop moving forward. They didn’t retreat to controversy-free PBS reunion specials. They made sure their loyal followers got what they wanted, and they kept new things coming to keep them from getting bored and looking elsewhere. It’s just that the spotlight is a fickle thing, and it has been flitting all around like a Blair Witch cameraman with Parkinson's.
So VME has pretty much had to toil in what might feel like obscurity as compared with the attention that the PCI derivatives and ATCA have garnered. And you might – just maybe – be forgiven for thinking that VME is an old standard that’s pretty much restricted to legacy applications. But you’d be wrong. Yes, VME’s application market has narrowed. But there is still demand, and that demand is sustained based on developments to the VMEbus standard that sprang from the VME Renaissance of 2002. [more]
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Working Embedded Networking
by Daryl R. Miller, Lantronix, Inc.
Many companies who develop and sell specialized electronics have realized the benefits of adding network connectivity to their products. It can, however, be a daunting task for an engineering group that specializes in some other facet of the industry (medical, security, building automation, industrial, etc.) to build and design wired 802.3 or wireless 802.11 networking into their end device. In addition to time-to-market concerns, stability, robustness, RFC compliance, agency certifications, support and other challenges, can become overwhelming.
To help mitigate the risk and headaches for designers, complete off-the-shelf communication modules are widely available. Such solutions support a wide variety of topologies including 802.3, 802.11, Zigbee and cellular and typically provide all the essential networking components in one, easy-to-implement solution. From a hardware standpoint, they are generally very easy to integrate and contain rich firmware functionality. Some vendors also supply deployment and management software which further reduces the effort on the part of the original equipment manufacturer (OEM). [more]
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