TUESDAY 22 OCTOBER 2019

Making the Most of 'Ready to Go' Partner Solutions

With software developers facing tremendous pressures to speed up the development and delivery of commercialised products, partnering with the right solutions provider can offer significant benefits by helping to reduce costs, speed up time to market and enable your product to secure that all-important competitive advantage. Rok Skutnik, Global Product Manager - Embedded at Densitron, explains.

The constantly shifting and fast-paced technological change puts design engineers and software developers under increasing pressure to innovate without incurring additional costs or compromising time to market. In today’s technologically advanced environment, it is rare that developers work on one single, isolated product that doesn’t have to communicate or interact with another device. More likely, they have to create solutions that integrate across multiple platforms, utilise different software solutions and talk to a variety of other devices to deliver a wide range of end-user applications.

This is particularly the case in industrial and B2B applications where there has been a significant increase in the use of advanced feature-rich high-definition graphical displays, screens and monitors that revolutionise the Human Machine Interface (HMI). You only have to compare the old and now outdated manual GUI-creating solutions with the latest user-friendly GUI-creator studios of today to see just how far the HMI has evolved. It is this trend that continues to exert increasing demands on the latest embedded solutions in terms of graphics, animation and multi-touch capability.

Sourcing, testing and customising the right hardware and most appropriate software solutions to optimise performance when developing and building your basic framework is always going to take more time and specialised software engineering expertise. Therefore, more money than you expect. Not only will this have a detrimental effect on your bottom line, but the subsequent loss of ground in bringing new products to market can also negate competitive advantage and have a negative impact on market share. What’s more, finding out that your embedded platform is not suitable or fit for purpose later in the project development cycle can be a costly mistake and set your launch date back by months.

Getting a head start in the development process and being able to think at the systems level early on is crucial to gaining ground, as well as being prepared with the best hardware and software solutions to address ongoing design and product development challenges. Therefore, working with a specialist solutions provider that can offer expert advice on all the crucial aspects of your project can contribute to success. And, when your end goal is to deliver a feature-rich graphical interface, finding a partner that can present you with a pre-configured, scalable framework which is already fully optimised for GUI applications can significantly accelerate your development timeline, reduce risks and enable early differentiation.
 
At Densitron, our unique combination of expertise in next-generation display technology and advanced electronics and systems engineering has enabled us to develop ready-made solutions that allow our customers to accelerate the development of their GUI for greater efficiencies. This has been achieved by pre-loading the latest Qt 5 software library onto an SBC that is pre-configured and tried and tested to deliver optimum performance with the latest screen and display technologies. 

The result is a 'ready to go' fully working Qt-based cross-platform SBC eco-environment that enables engineers to start developing their products immediately. This out-of-box solution features native compiling of Qt applications, allowing for quick and easy development from the board itself without needing to install any extra software. In addition, our solutions are also configured to facilitate the quick startup of cross-compiling on pre-configured 'virtual machine' images. These options eliminate the process of initial Qt software set-up and configuration, testing and rework, as well as the abundance of potential set-up issues that so often take several months and a significant amount of specialist technical resources to resolve.

With our 'ready to go' Qt-based environments offering a plug-and-play solution, our customers also benefit from ongoing support, advice and working examples of how to maximise Qt development for more advanced topics and specific applications. In addition, our platforms also allow engineers to explore and build their own bespoke Qt set-up if required.

The Qt-based framework provides a head start for engineers when developing their specific functionalities and user interface, while our support also includes cross-compiling, enabling development to be undertaken on a laptop or desktop PC and transferred and debugged immediately over Ethernet onto the SBC, giving a true out-of-the-box advantage. This allows for easy device interaction giving developers the fundamentals needed from day one for quick, simple and fully flexible development capabilities to build a variety of user experiences - from very simple open-source solutions to highly customised bespoke versions. Furthermore, the Qt open-source platform offers greater potential for continual product adaptability, ongoing future-proofing, and product life extension.

While the opportunities for design engineers and software developers to start from scratch and create their own customised bespoke solutions are undoubtedly tempting, and indeed, the talent and tools are in abundance, new product development constraints are very much dictated by a series of external demands. These include the needs of customers, the requirements of the industry, and of course, those all-important time and cost considerations. In this case, taking a pre-loaded Qt platform that is development-ready and already configured for use with the latest display and screen technology offers a considerable advantage in the race to market.

As the pace of change continues to gain momentum, time and cost considerations will ultimately dictate the new product lifecycle putting increasing pressures on the design and development teams to deliver within ever-decreasing timescales. It's in these situations that working with a trusted specialist partner that can offer expert product and technical advice and ready-made plug-and-play solutions can help you propel your development project forward and give you a head start in the race to the finish.