XPe make sense?

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Guest

Hi All:
Newbie question....I'm trying to figure out of XPe makes sense for my project.
I'm building a data collection box that has a PCI AtoD card with Windows
device driver, RAID controller card, Matlab, and a small C++ application to
control the card and write data to disk.
The goal is to squeeze as much run-time performance as possible to keep up
with the AtoD card.
Any thoughts/suggestions greatly appreciated!
THANXS
amb
 
AMB,

I think most of us are newbies, around here, unless you work for a
company that needs the OS redesigned every other day. I'm hoping that
once I get a working, stable image I can file this skill-set under
"helpful and occasional exposure" but, for now, it's become a near
full-time job. Anyway, to try and answer your question, if you want
to be able to run a set-top box without an active Windows shell (start
menu, desktop, user configuration, etc.) then XPe is your best bet,
unless you want to try your hand at CE. You'll need to have your C++
development make a custom visual shell controller interface to replace
the Explorer shell. To be honest, that's what my company has done.
We use industrial analog and digital I/O boards to control and monitor
glass tempering furnaces. It's got a "simple" (as our programming
vendor puts it... not me) shell and our proprietary, stand-alone
software running over XPe. So far, our biggest obstacle has been
enabling support for networking devices. I'm going on my fourth week
trying to resolve dial-up networking dependencies so that we can dial
into these machines for program and configuration updates and
downloads. However, compare to that, simple ethernet/internet
networking support (even wirelessly) was pretty easy to add/enable.
As for RAID support, that's also, probably, just a matter of device
support and enabling the specific administrative components and
services you want available (command-line or GUI based).

Best of luck and welcome.
~ Jodie
 
amb,

I'd say Yes, XPe would be a good choice for you if you are looking for the rapid development for the platform and it is x86 hardware
(better say, XP Pro compatible).

Technically you should be able to optimize the image for the best performance but I can imagine full Matlab install is quite heavy
beast. Drivers including RAID support is an easy thing (check out the product documentation for how-to's).

Please keep in mind that without a 3rd party support XPe won't give you a real-time performance, in case this is what you are
looking for. If it is, you may want to take a look at the Windows CE product of MS that is a real-time OS. Although I can imagine
you may have troubles there with Matlab - haven't heard if this math app was ever ported to CE.

To find an easy answer to your questions, but without spending of much efforts to optimize the image performance, you may want to
try to prototype the system with XP Pro. If it works there, you can definitely get it working on XPe and get better [sometime *much*
better] performance.
 
I second KM's idea to use XP Pro as a test solution.

The reverse question that you have to ask is what other OS would you use -
Linux, Windows CE, etc.? With another OS you might have to re-write or
re-create the device drivers and applications from scratch. What is the cost
for do all the work? Does Matlab support Linux or CE?

Regards,

Sean Liming
www.sjjmicro.com / www.seanliming.com
XP Embedded Book Author - XP Embedded Advanced, XP Embedded Supplemental
Toolkit
 
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