Tuesday 23 August 2016

Rugged Tablet computers and why can't use an ordinary Apple of Samsung Tablet.

So you need a way to capture data in the field, you need a mobile device running Windows or Android for data capture and monitoring. Many people faced with this requirement immediately look at consumer grade standard tablet Computers. Standard Tablet Computer (STC) such as a Samsung tablet, look great, are easy to obtain and are cheap. Buy a few of these; give them to your staff with a bit of software on them and away you go – job done. It is very tempting to do this but as I will explain it is a false economy and you will open yourself up to a load of problems you didn’t think about.
 A decent 10.1 inch Tablet costs around £300, is lightweight, easy to get and are easy to setup your own Windows or Android apps. A Rugged Tablet computer (RTC) costs £700-£1000, is a lot thicker and heavier and can only be sourced from a few suppliers. Why choose an RTC over an STC?

 A Case Study

A shipping firm in Africa needed a way for staff to walk around the dock and monitor containers. The staff needed to check cargo numbers as they were unloaded. They decided to use locally sourced consumer grade tablets. These were bought and loaded with the docks application and given to staff. Job done! It worked for a while until two of the tablets went “missing” after a week. These were replaced (took a week), shortly afterward one developed a fault on its charging port because the staff were not careful when plugging in the chargers, another was dropped and broke the screen. These units were sent off for repair under warranty leaving only three working devices. It took five weeks to get the units repaired.
During operation several staff complained the screens weren’t bright enough, being Africa it was very bright outside and their tablets were difficult to read in direct sunlight. Several of the devices shut down when they got hot, staff managed to work round this by trying to keep the devices in the shade. Several of the devices developed faults in operation which was traced down to staff installing games on the devices which interfered with normal operation. Staff wanted to scan the bar-codes on some of the containers and so separate scanners were needed, the tablet they had did not have a full sized USB port so two new different units were bought with full USB sockets. This meant staff had to carry two devices around and more tablets were broken due to staff dropping the units. Cases were bought for the devices to try to protect against drops. The charging connector on the tablets was a constant source of problems and more tablets had to be bought since the repair turn-around could be months. This meant always having spares units doing nothing in case of failure. The batteries did not last all day, some busy days the units ran out of power and so had to be left in the office to recharge, this meant buying more units and leaving some on charge.
 The advantages of buying consumer grade products is mainly price, but in the example above the initial price is only one aspect of the overall Cost Of Ownership (COO). If you add up all the costs involved in this example you can see that the initial purchase price of the units is only a small part of the true costs.  Five units were needed, customer bought two extra with full USB ports and 3 extra to allow for repairs and battery issues. Meaning in effect the customer had to buy 10 units to ensure 5 were operational at all times. Any additional features that were required meant buying new tablets.
 Additional costs are:Shipping back and forth for repairs.
Additional purchases for new features and spares.
Additional units to allow for battery longevity issues.
Lost productivity due to units out of action.
Additional protection.
Anti theft costs.
IT costs for fixing software issues caused by staff tampering.
Reductions in productivity due to tablet limitations such as temperature and screen brightness issues.
Buying new units to get new features.
It’s difficult to add up all these costs but it is easy to see that the £300 retail price is easily doubled if not trebled to get the real cost of ownership.

RTC-700A
The customer bought 5 of the 7 inch RTC-700A units from AAEON which cost approximately £700-£800 each. These units are designed for industrial use, have higher range of temperature operations and hot-swap batteries. Additional docks and bar-code scanners can be bought later IF and when required without changing the original units. The 700A is much less likely to be dropped or stolen (does not have access to the Google apps store by default), is protected in case of drops, has full size USB ports, hot swap batteries as well as a range of add-ons. This unit has already saved the customer countless hours of productivity, reduced installation and operational costs and generally saved time and money on repairs and maintenance. 
RTC-600A
 The AAEON RTC units come in 5.7 inch, 7 inch, 10.1 and 11.9 inch units. The larger units can run Windows as well as Android and have a range of options such as WI-FI, 3G, Bar-code readers, docking stations with extra ports.
 If you would like to know more about our range of rugged computer equipment please contact RDS on 01959 563 345. WWW.REVIEW-DISPLAYS.CO.UK
 

Thursday 18 August 2016


Kaby Lake Intel Core processor: 7th-gen CPU news, rumors and release date



Intel showed off a glimpse of what its latest chips are capable of during its IDF 2016 keynote, but not much else so far. Read on to learn more about that very glimpse.
Kaby Lake is the next generation of CPUs from Intel. Right now we're in the Skylake generation. You'll still see quite a few laptops from the previous Broadwell and Haswell series on sale, but they are officially past-it.
Here are all the details you need to know on the upcoming Intel Kaby Lake CPU revolution.
Cut to the chase
  • What is it? Intel's 7th-generation Core processor
  • When is it out? Before the end of 2016
  • What will it cost? Likely similar to Intel's current Skylake processors
Intel Kaby Lake release date
Kaby Lake is on our doorstep. Intel CEO Brian Krzanich confirmed on July 22 that Kaby Lake chipsets have made their way to PC builders.
This means we can expect to see a few Kaby Lake PCs arrive before the end of 2016. However, right now we don't know the exact chipsets that will arrive in the first wave.
Kaby Lake includes desktop CPUs, Intel Core i3/i5/i7 laptop CPUs and new Core M chipsets, as well as server-class models.
Even after Intel's keynote at its very own 2016 Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, Calif., we do not yet know the release date of the 7th generation of Intel Core series processors. However, at the show, Intel showed off a Dell XPS machine running a 7th generation Core i5 chip running recent shooter darling Overwatch using its own onboard GPU. We expect to learn more details shortly.



Kaby Lake leaked CPUs
Three Kaby Lake CPU models have already been leaked, though, one from each of the three mainstream lines of Intel chipsets. The Core i7-7700K is the leaked desktop CPU.
This tells us the Kaby Lake naming convention will remain similar: they are "7" series CPUs, to Skylake's gen 6, Broadwell's gen 5 and so on.
The i7-7700K is a quad-core hyper-threaded CPU, and benchmarks leaked all the way back in March suggest it's clocked at 3.6GHz with a 4.2GHz turbo boost. Of course, that may change by the time the chipset is actually used.
The CPU was leaked in the SiSoft benchmark result database, but unfortunately the results published are actually significantly worse than those of the i7-6700K, so don't tell us anything about Kaby Lake's performance. A downgrade upgrade? Let's hope not.
Next up is the Core i7-7500U, leaked alongside the i7-7700K. This is the sort of CPU we might end up seeing in a high-end ultrabook. It's a relatively high performance chipset, but still belongs to the "U" ultra-low voltage family.


It has two cores, four threads, and is clocked at 2.7GHz with a 2.9GHz turbo. Some of you might turn your noses up at dual-core laptop chipsets, but they're pretty important.
The most on-trend leaked CPU of the lot, though, is the Intel Core M7-7Y75. This is likely to be used in some of those impossibly slim laptops whose frames are filled more with battery than anything else.
Intel Kaby Lake first laptops
Where will these chipsets end up? None of the key laptops makers have officially announced any Kaby Lake laptops yet. They couldn't without having access to the hardware, not to mention letting Intel announce the chipsets first.
Apple Insider suggests that Apple is not among the first manufacturers to get hold of the new chipsets. Of course, Apple is more at risk of alienating buyers by offering early-as-possible upgrades, when its MacBook lines were only refreshed in April 2016.
It doesn't need to be in as much of a rush as, say, Asus or Lenovo.
Some suggest Apple may skip over Kaby Lake altogether, but this seems unlikely when its successor Intel Cannonlake is not due to arrive until the second half of 2017.

Intel Kaby Lake architecture
Cannonlake is likely to prove a much more exciting update than Kaby Lake too. You see, Kaby Lake is very similar to the Skylake family we're already using. This is not what we originally expected of the Skylake successor, but Intel has changed how its processor development works.
Since 2007, Intel has worked in a 'tick, tock' rhythm of upgrades, where one generation shrinks the die, followed by a generation that alters the architecture. That changed this year. As of 2016, Intel now uses a "Process, Architecture, Optimisation" approach, and Kaby Lake represents that last, frankly least interesting stage.
It's still a 14nm processor, it's fairly similar to Skylake throughout and the desktop variants will use the same LGA 1151 socket. Unless something terrible goes wrong, Cannonlake will shrink Intel CPUs down to the long-promised 10nm die in 2017.
While there are likely to be some performance and efficiency improvements, it seems unlikely those with a Skylake CPU will need/want to upgrade to a Kaby Lake processor of the same level.



Intel Kaby Lake upgrades
There are some distinct improvements involved in Kaby Lake, though. The first is fully integrated support for USB-C Gen 2. Skylake machines can offer this already, but need an extra third-party piece of hardware. It'll soon be 'native'. Again, it's not exciting but is necessary.
Gen 2 USB 3.1 enables bandwidth of 10Gbps, rather than 5Gbps. Thunderbolt 3 support is in too.
In a similar vein, HDCP 2.2 support is native in Kaby Lake. This digital copy protection, a newer version designed for certain 4K video standards. Ultra HD Blu-ray is the key one.

Kaby Lake is also expected to offer integrated GPUs better-suited to 4K video, although no exact details are available on the tech. This may simply mean more power. After all, current Intel Core-series CPUs can already output to multiple 4K monitors using integrated graphics. They just won't be to happy about the fact if you start doing anything remotely demanding.
Kaby Lake will only officially support Windows 10 too, among Windows operating systems. This is yet another attempt by Microsoft to push those lingering on Windows 7, or anything a little newer, into the present.

Apollo Lake: Kaby Lake's poor cousin
It's also worth considering the low-end Atom chipsets you'll see used in very cheap laptops and Windows 10 tablets in (potentially) late 2016 and 2017. These are not part of Kaby Lake, but a separate family called Apollo Lake.
No Apollo Lake-powered laptops have appeared yet, but early reports suggest a performance increase of as much as 30 per cent. This is good news given how poorly some Windows 10 devices currently run using low-end hardware.

Kaby Lake-X: a higher-end future
If you're only interested in mainstream Kaby Lake models, the future isn't looking too complicated. They'll trickle out, before being replaced by Cannonlake CPUs in late 2017. However, the outlook for seriously high-end hardware is more convoluted.
Right now Intel's newest high-end CPUs are part of the Broadwell-E series, even though among mainstream processors Broadwell is already old news. Quite simply, the real high-end hardware comes later. We're talking about CPUs like the £1000 i7-6900k.
The Kaby Lake alternative will not be called Kaby Lake-E but Kaby Lake-X, and is expected to launch in the second half of 2017 alongside Skylake-X. That's right: two generations at the same time.
Kaby Lake-X will reportedly offer a four-core processor, while Skylake-X will man the ascent to the almost-baffling 10-core version.

What mere mortal laptop and desktop buyers need to take from Kaby Lake, though, is that a) we'll see machines using the new chipsets very soon and b) unless you already need an upgrade you might want to see whether 2017's Cannonlake brings more exciting improvements.


Tuesday 9 August 2016

The PICO - IMX7 - EMMC. A tiny board with big ambitions.



Over the last decade computer systems have become more powerful and smaller with each new generation. Here we are in the early 21st century and this trend continues. Technexion have recently released a new system on a chip (SOC) called the PICO-IMX7-EMMC, it's tiny. This little board measures 36mm by 40mm, the CPU power that this little unit has is just plain amazing.

It's based around the NXP i.IMX7 chipset and has two versions; the 800MHz solo and 1GHz Dual core unit. It utilizes up to 2 GB of DDR3 RAM and has onboard 4GB of eMMC storage. These features alone make it ideal for embedded applications where processing power is needed in a small space but it gets better.

The PICO board has a huge array of IO ports:

Edison I/O @ 1.8V
9 x GPIO
4 x PWM
2 x I2C
1 x I2S
1 x SPI
2 x UART
USB-OTG
SDIO (4-bit)

Additional I/O @ 3.3V
24 bit TTL RGB
RGMII LAN
CAN
USB Host
I2C

Operating systems that run include Linux 3.x, Yocto and Brillo.

The choice for embedded systems now is vast and with boards like the PICO IMX7, more and more power is available in a very small space.

Specifications

ProcessorNXP i.MX7 Solo / Dual
TechnologyARM Cortex-A7 single core @800Mhz + Cortex-M4
ARM Cortex-A7 dual core @ 1Ghz + Cortex-M4
Power Management ICNXP PF3000
System MemoryUpto 2GB LPDDR3
Storageonboard eMMC (default 4GB)
Operation SystemLinux, Yocto, Android , Ubuntu

Connectivity

Gigabit Network RGMIISignals routed to board-to-board connector
Wireless LANBroadcom BCM4339 802.11ac
BluetoothBroadcom BCM4339 Bluetooth v. 4.0

Connectors

Board-to-Board1x Intel Edison compatible connector (Hirose 70-pin)
2x Hirose 70-pin connectors

I/O Interface Signalling

Edison I/O @ 1.8V9x GPIO
4x PWM
2x I²C
1x I²S
1x SPI
2x UART
USB-OTG
SDIO (4-bit)
Additional I/O @ 3.3V24-bit TTL RGB
MIPI CSI Camera
MIPI DSI Display
PCIe
RGMII (gigabit LAN)
Flex CAN version 2.0B Compliant

Video

PXPImage re-sizing, rotation, overlay and CSC Pixel Processing Pipeline

Audio

InterfaceI²S (1 channel)
Audio CodecOn Carrier Board

 

Power Specifications

Input Power Requirements4.2 ~ 5.25 VDC

Environmental and Mechanical

TemperatureCommercial : 0° to 60° C
Extended : -20° to 70° C
Industrial : -35° to 85° C (no WiFi possible)
Humidity10 - 90%
Dimensions36 x 40 mm
1⅜ x 1 inch
Weight8 grams
CertificationCompliant with CE, FCC, RoHS, REACh directives






For more information on the Technexion PICO IMX7 please contact RDS on:

01959 563 345