Steve Rooke wrote:
That seems to indicate these devices are running a version of embedded
Windows for them to get infected by a virus and I wonder why they need
such a sledgehammer internally.
Steve
PS. sorry for top-posting but that's the only way I can reply at the
moment (basic HTML Gmail).
Yes.. most are running some flavor of Windows Embedded (formerly known
as WinCE) or WinXP. It's a cost driven thing.. small form factor
motherboards are readily available, windows gives you a familiar (to
most users) interface for doing things like setup of the network
interface, file system, etc. I'd say it's probably cheaper (in a
capital investment sense) to put a small PC into the instrument than to
design your own custom controller board, write embedded software for it,
etc.)
Especially if you want commonality across your whole line, where the
higher end instruments have fairly sophisticated add-on software (all
those slick applications that analyze signals, set things up), choosing
some sort of popular OS platform makes sense.
MS makes it pretty easy to do the development.. The Visual Studio
products are inexpensive, well integrated, etc. They've got decent
documentation for generating stripped down installs suitable for
instruments. They also have update management, etc.
Some flavor of Linux is really the alternative, and the learning curve
to get started with embedded applications is a bit steeper, especially
if you want more than what can be done by a command line interface.
Which GUI toolkit do you use? Where do you get it? etc. With Windows,
that whole list of choices has been made for you.
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