Author: David Thomson– Managing Director at Blue Chip Technology
1. Introducing BetaWeb.
There’s no two ways about it, developing high quality products is difficult. Today a large number of products not only require unique knowledge of the target industry but also complex embedded electronics and software to achieve the required specification and expectations for high quality, smooth, responsive are ever more demanding.
Development times are lengthening, costs are rising and there are significant skills shortages preventing companies achieving their goals. Embedded software engineers with application development expertise in environments such as Linux, QNX or FreeRTOS are rare commodities. At Blue Chip technology we constantly seek ways to help customers achieve their goals and shorten time to market. We’ve supported Android (AOSP) on all of our platforms for several years to offer an alternative application development operating system and enable customers to leverage the large community of skilled Android software engineers. We’ve now gone one step further, enabling complex embedded systems to be developed without the need for any operating system knowledge.
If you can design a website you can use BetaWeb to create an embedded kiosk mode HMI entirely in HTML5 and Javascript.
BetaWeb offers unique features that allow complete systems to be designed and built around Blue Chip Technology’s configurable BETA+TM3 LCD+Touch embedded platform with a wide array of industry standard interfaces that often eliminates the need for additional embedded electronics, reducing system cost, and accelerating development.
BetaWeb can work both online via onboard Ethernet or Wifi and via locally stored offline webpages or even in a hybrid mode. Onboard 8GB eMMC storage offers ample space for locally hosted pages.
In an ever more cybersecurity aware world BetaWeb allows system designers to install and control security certificates, enable and disable cookies and caching. Locally stored content can be signed and encrypted to prevent malicious sideloading of alterative content.
BetaWeb uniquely provides Javascript APIs to enable high speed, low latency access to onboard hardware. 12 local GPIO and a RS232/422/485 UART. A BetaWeb equipped system can monitor and control external equipment directly, eliminating the need for separate electronics or even a PLC. GPIO interfaces can be customised to offer higher voltage and current drive capabilities via the addition of a 50-way expansion hat. SPI, CAN bus, I2C and other interfaces can also be supported on request. Contact Us to discuss your custom requirements. The video below demonstrates the ability to read inputs and drive outputs directly from a webpage via BetaWeb’s APIs.
In more traditional use cases BetaWeb can be paired with a webserver capable RTU / SCADA PLC or Building Management System (BMS) such as, Distech (EC-NET), Honeywell Centraline (Arena), Niagara 4 Jace, Niagara 4 PC Supervisors from Tridium, TONN, Hawk, EC-BOS (3, 6 & 8000) or Trend (IQ Vision).
Hardware accelerated OpenGL and Video Decode opens opportunities for interactive Promotional displays, Virtual showrooms, Product configuration and even EPOS. Remote hosting provides simple estate wide deployment, real time information.
In an ever changing more complex world you can be confident Blue Chip Technology are a long term partner committed to helping customers reduce time to market and achieve their goals.
About Blue Chip Technology
At Blue Chip Technology (BCT) we specialise in design and manufacture of embedded electronics systems, Hardware, Firmware and Applications. Our typical customer will usually have a proof of concept and will work with Blue Chip to engineer what is often a complex collection of circuit boards into a commercialised solution.
The Beta HMI platform offers an opportunity to develop those prototypes with a validated, field proven integrated SBC, LCD and touch platform, saving several design and development iterations. BCT’s in house manufacturing and commitment to full life cycle support offers a unique proposition to dramatically reduce time to market, approvals and start-up costs.
www.bluechiptechnology.com sales@bluechiptechnology.com
