The first decision an engineer has to make when looking at an embedded design is: do I develop this myself, or is there an off the shelf solution available? Both have their pitfalls. The first comes down to engineering time and cost to engineer a bespoke platform that will do exactly what the customer wants, but this can take many months of development. The second route is easier as you procure an off the shelf board, but you need to find something to fit within the design constraints of the product and ensure that you can continue to get the same board over the product lifetime, and in the world of single board computers the shelf life can be notoriously short.
Arrival Electronics believe they have a solution that bridges this gap – the Mi Embedded series. This is a fully customisable embedded computing platform, based around a defined CPU core, the platform has a breadboard area which allows a customer to add their own peripherals and I/O functionality, Mi Embedded will then turn this “prototype” into a fully working custom board, that exactly meets the customers specification. The customer retains full rights and ownership and receives a complete build pack allowing them to manufacture the board themselves, or if required Mi Embedded will provide this function.
This is the best of both worlds for the customer, they get months of embedded design provided by Arrival Electronics, quickly and without issue.
Focusing on extended lifetime CPUs such as the Intel Dual Core 1.5Ghz Baytrail processor, the Mi Embedded platform can support up to a 7 year life and is designed for industrial applications, operating from -40 to +110 and is in vehicle compliant, as well as supporting onboard graphics capability up to 3840×2160@30 displays, USB3.0, HDMI1.4a, dual eSATA 2.x/3.x and 10/100/1000 interfaces.
As part of the approach to embedded design, the Mi Embedded series have a 2nd smaller processor built into the system, this allows for improved efficiencies with the smaller processor managing the I/O functions and waking up the main CPU as necessary.
With Raspberry PI and Arduino board compatability, this could be the future of embedded design and gives the engineer their own bespoke embedded design at a fraction of the usual development cost.
