EMBEDDED HARDWARE CONSIDERATIONS

A development environment good for learning the technology may not be the best for professional development. To minimize the time and unnecessary aggravation during the learning process, it’s best to select a hardware platform with proper support for Compact 7.

Following are the basic requirements for the hardware needed to establish a proper Compact 7 development environment:

  • Board support package for Compact 7 that includes all the required drivers
  • Kernel Independent Transport Layer (KITL) driver needed to support debugging
  • Bootloader to launch OS runtime image from local storage
  • Bootloader to download OS runtime image from the Platform Builder development station

Device driver and OEM adaptation layer development are major tasks. If the necessary device driver and OEM adaptation layer are not provided by the hardware manufacture or Microsoft, these are challenging and difficult components to develop.

eBox-3310A

The eBox-3310A (eBox), the target device for the exercises in this book, is built with MSTI PDX-600 System-on-Chip (SoC), a derivative of the Vortex86DX SoC. There are Compact 7 BSP, device drivers, bootloader, SDK, and utilities available to support the eBox.

The eBox family of products has been used as a learning platform for Windows Embedded Compact within the academic community worldwide since 2005 and has been chosen by Microsoft as the hardware platform for the annual Imagine Cup Embedded Development competition since the inception ...

Get Professional Windows® Embedded Compact 7 now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.