Adlink rolls industrial-ready dev kit

By Gina Roos, editor-in-chief

Adlink Technology has released the Industrial-Pi (I-Pi) Smart Mobility ARChitecture (SMARC) development kit. Designed to help engineers reduce prototyping and development time, the I-Pi SMARC development kit is a low-cost, industrial-ready hardware platform that engineers can use at work or home to experiment with peripherals and sensors. The industrial-grade SMARC module is supported by an Adlink change control process.

Adlink said that “the development kit is an industrial-ready substitute for Arduino and Raspberry Pi (RPi) platforms that are commonly used for prototyping but cannot typically be ‘dropped’ into an industrial solution as-is.”

The development kit contains an I-Pi carrier board, an LEC-PX30 SMARC module, a power supply, a USB programming cable, an SD memory card containing a Linux OS, and transparent acrylic shielding.

For ease of software development, the kit is supported by a hardware abstraction layer (HAL), called MRAA, and a software repository, called Useful Packages and Modules (UPM), both from Intel. MRAA simplifies the logic for connecting to different sensor pins and supports Arduino and RPi platforms, C++, Python, JavaScript, and Java, while UPM provides software drivers for commonly used sensors and actuators, which are also available for Arduino and RPi platforms.

The platform also allows engineers who have created prototypes using Arduino or RPi platforms to migrate their designs into the revision-controlled, industrial-production environment.

To address life-cycle management issues, any component or process change to an Adlink SMARC module is announced per an engineering change notice (ECN) and process change notice (PCN) a minimum of six months before the implementation. Module support includes 10-year availability, after-sales support, return merchandise authorization (RMA), and reporting and debugging on production quality issues.