Computex, Taiwan's annual tech trade show kicks off next Tuesday. Held in Taipei, VIA's home town, VIA is always there, usually with more than one display booth or area. The Emebdded division has issued a Press Release about what they will be showing off. No new products are mentioned. The focus is on recently launched products like the Em-ITX and the AMOS-3001.
The quote in the Press Release was very well written as it highlights where VIA is at these days in the embedded space.
Daniel Wu, Vice President of VIA Embedded, VIA Technologies, Inc. “With crucial design innovations at processor, chipset, board and system levels, VIA is driving forward a new era in embedded device design.”
There are a whole lot of companies who display at Computex that take chips and motherboards from one company and then design a device, chassis, board, etc of their own. VIA use their own chips in their designs and I am sure that at times the chip doesn't come before the platform or the system - the chip is developed with certain features to fit in with an end product design. Interesting.
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Monday, May 24, 2010
VIA Em-ITX board in racing car!
The VIA Em-ITX form factor is the embedded platform that I refer to as LEGO-inspired. You take the VIA EITX 3000 board and then, if you need to, you can plug in smaller boards to add more features. This project, however, proves that the EITX-3000 is just as valuable on its own.
Students from the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at Lakehead University in Canada, built a race car to compete in the Formula SAE competition. 2010 was there second entry and second car, and their design is impressive.
The Lakehead University car can go from 0-100km/h (60 mph) in just four seconds! The 600CC engine was designed for a Honda motorcycle but they adapted it for use with the steel tube space frame that the team designed and constructed. The drive train is 6 speed short geared, chain drive, with a spool differential. It’s also decked out with suspension.
What’s particularly unique about the car is that there’s a little VIA PC inside all hooked up for engine adjustments, fuel monitoring, driver communication, GPS tracking and more.
The VIA EITX-3000 has two Gigabit Ethernet ports, two RS-232 and two RS-232/422/485 ports and six USB ports, giving ample room for all of the diverse connections the team needed.
Allan C. Pan who worked in the Electrical Team said that the VIA board was used for:
1) Real-time Engine control for both monitoring and on-fly perimeters adjustment
2) Real-time Air-Fuel Ratio for both monitoring and on-fly perimeters adjustment
3) Real-time GPS vehicle tracking over google earth and other map software
4) two Real-time Video and Audio feeds (one over see the the driver+road ahead and other one over see the suspension system)
5) two wireless networks, 1 for peer to peer connection using VPN, other one to connect other open/provided wifi netowrk for internet data access
6) WiMax network
7) dual Bluetooth PAN network, one for host system peripherals, the other one for data accessing
8) video streaming over LAN and WAN with compression
Many, many different crew members can be monitoring, tuning and communicating with the car and the driver, all at the same time, thanks to the VIA EITX-3000 board.
Earlier this month the team competed in the FSAE Michigan 2010 and they cam 39 out of 120 – not a bad showing at all!
You never know where you’ll find a VIA embedded board!
Students from the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at Lakehead University in Canada, built a race car to compete in the Formula SAE competition. 2010 was there second entry and second car, and their design is impressive.
The Lakehead University car can go from 0-100km/h (60 mph) in just four seconds! The 600CC engine was designed for a Honda motorcycle but they adapted it for use with the steel tube space frame that the team designed and constructed. The drive train is 6 speed short geared, chain drive, with a spool differential. It’s also decked out with suspension.
What’s particularly unique about the car is that there’s a little VIA PC inside all hooked up for engine adjustments, fuel monitoring, driver communication, GPS tracking and more.
The VIA EITX-3000 has two Gigabit Ethernet ports, two RS-232 and two RS-232/422/485 ports and six USB ports, giving ample room for all of the diverse connections the team needed.
Allan C. Pan who worked in the Electrical Team said that the VIA board was used for:
1) Real-time Engine control for both monitoring and on-fly perimeters adjustment
2) Real-time Air-Fuel Ratio for both monitoring and on-fly perimeters adjustment
3) Real-time GPS vehicle tracking over google earth and other map software
4) two Real-time Video and Audio feeds (one over see the the driver+road ahead and other one over see the suspension system)
5) two wireless networks, 1 for peer to peer connection using VPN, other one to connect other open/provided wifi netowrk for internet data access
6) WiMax network
7) dual Bluetooth PAN network, one for host system peripherals, the other one for data accessing
8) video streaming over LAN and WAN with compression
Many, many different crew members can be monitoring, tuning and communicating with the car and the driver, all at the same time, thanks to the VIA EITX-3000 board.
Earlier this month the team competed in the FSAE Michigan 2010 and they cam 39 out of 120 – not a bad showing at all!
You never know where you’ll find a VIA embedded board!
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Logitec and VIA team up on NAS security
VIA's processors have had integrated security encryption at a hardware level for many years. The technology really is industry leading. Dell has taken advantage of it before in some cloud server products but it's good to see a consumer level product being launched that brings data encrytion to NAS.
Logitec will launch some NAS products that use VIA's in-built security, including AES disk encryption. VIA's Press Release highlights how closely Logitec and VIA's ACE-CNX team have been working together to build the new NAS designs.
“At Logitec we strive to employ the very latest security features across our range of data storage products,” said Tsugio Shimizu, General Manager, Business Solution Department, Logitec Corp. “Through working closely with the VIA ACE-CNX team we can now unlock the potential of VIA’s unique processor platforms, bringing seamless data encryption to our advanced NAS products.”
The new designs are being shown off at ESEC in Japan this week. There is no word on when they'll hit the market.
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
EPIA-M830: Getting to the specifics
VIA's EPIA range of motherboards are getting more and more targetted lately. Embedded computing is such a speciality field and VIA are pumping out Mini-ITX boards that meet the criteria for explicit uses, in this case POS, kiosk and POI applications.
"The VIA EPIA-M830 is designed to take the kiosk to this next phase, providing the backbone of devices that offer cashless purchasing and self service infrastructures in supermarkets and gas stations as well as more secure and interactive, multimedia-rich POI, lotto and gaming machines."
VIA are clearly thinking about the future here, although they must also be responding to demand. Somewhere out there are embedded developers dreaming up designs for embedded computers that will enhance our visit to the zoo, or streamline the process of getting a ticket for the train. I just hope they're a little bit smarter than the auto-checkout at Woolworths! - VIA
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