Re: Some broad questions

OK, that's definitely a custom device. In virtually *all* cases, drivers
will be the thing that limits your ability to hook up random devices to the
system. It looks to me like you could do the following hardware:

1. You need some means of connecting a WiFi device. The ones that you can
most-easily use with Windows CE are USB and PCMCIA. So, you'll have to
count up the number of ways to connect devices to whatever hardware you
choose and make sure you have enough.

**2**. Touchscreen/display is a problem unless you do everything yourself
because there's no standard way to connect it. There is at least one
standard touchscreen manufacturer out there that has a CE driver. You can
use GoogleGroups at groups.google.com to search the archives for them. Have
you identified some kind of a display device that hooks to VGA and has
touchscreen for PS/2 or USB on it? You need to concentrate on this one
until you figure out how you're going to do it. It's the one that you are
furthest from implementing, since you don't know how you're going to hook up
the touchscreen and you need to define what 'display' means to you (CRT, LCD
with ordinary LCD I/O or a VGA interface, which standard LCD panels don't
have, mostly).

3. The camera has recently been 'solved' as long as you use *one* particular
USB camera by an open-source project started by MS. Look at
http://msdn.microsoft.com/embedded/usewinemb/ce/sharedsrccode/usbdriver/default.aspx

4. I don't know *what* you are going to do for proximity. We've used
proximity sensors that have RS-232 outputs, but not with CE. You'd have to
figure out exactly what to do about that on your device and build something
suitable into the OS. Of course, if it's serial, you can just code serial
I/O into your own 'proximity driver' or something, but, of course, that's
custom code.

All-in-all, after figuring out how you're going to do #2 above, I'd start
off looking at a board based on a VIA processor (x86, PC-like thing). You
need a board that has a Windows CE Board Support Package for it, of course,
as you don't want to have to create such a thing. That BSP will handle the
initialization of the on-board devices, will provide the drivers for those,
as well as for the I/O that's already on the board (display controller, USB
host, PCMCIA, if appropriate).

For software development, look at it as two pieces: 1) the operating system,
support for the underlying main board, and the drivers for the peripheral
devices, and 2) the actual application software that will handle detection
of people nearby, reading of camera data and display of other user pictures
from remote cameras, network communication, handling disconnected state of
network (which will occur if you are using wireless, absolutely). The
components of item 1 above will be developed with Platform Builder. The
components of item 2 above will be developed with either eMbedded Visual C++
4.0 or Visual Studio 2005. Since you are building the OS and can generate
the SDK yourself, you can choose which application development environment
you want to use.

Further, how is this going to be packaged? It's just a loose board with a
display somehow connected to it and a camera that the user plugs in? Or are
you building it into a case? Does it do anything other than provide visual
communication between nodes and indication of user presence at a node?

We actually have a device in development that would handle much of this
stuff (no proximity or camera, although you could use the driver mentioned
above and USB to connect it). I can't go into details about when it will be
done or how much it's going to cost, but you could contact me off-line if
you want to talk about it in some more detail.

This is a multi-man-year project -- I hope that you've figured that out
already!

Paul Tobey
New Product Development Manager
Intelligent Instrumentation
p <dot> tobey <at> instrument <dot> com


"Robby" <Robby@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:05CA02A1-6AE5-49CE-89FD-65064532723C@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Hi Paul!

Firs and fore-most, thankyou for your post.

My project consists of several points in a commercial plant where each
point
is an embeded board running WCE. Each point must be able to talk to each
other using the WIFI medium. Also, each point must have a 4" inch touch
screen display and a small camera so that the users at each point can
visually see each other.(Meaning say, at the top left corner you can see
onother user at another remote point located within the same building. And
where the rest of the screen would be buttons or list box controls and so
forth....)

Furthermore, only if the user is in the proximity of his point (Say 2 ft
or
closer to the embeded board), then the other points are informed that
there
is a user present at that point.

I can go on.... however I think you get the idea.

I am not expecting to find a vendor to sell me a reference board with a
camera and the motion detector and IOs..... I can do that stuff using a
USB
port on the refernce board and connect some of my own interface electronic
boards or a USB camera.

But I don't know where exactly to start or where I can buy a board that
would suit this application. Also, will WCE have all the drivers to do
this
through eVC++ or Visual studio.

Let me know if you want more detail....

Your time is much appreciated!

Thankyou!

--
Best regards
Robert


"Paul G. Tobey [eMVP]" wrote:

It sounds to me like what you want is a board that already runs Windows
CE
and which you can use to write *applications* for, not something for
which
you want to configure and install a custom version of the operating
system.
If that's the case, depending on which version of Windows CE the target
hardware runs, you may or may not be able to use VS2005 to write code for
it.

If you can clarify what exactly you're trying to do, we might be able to
point you to one or a few sources of hardware that would work for you.
Is
this a school project or what? If so, what are you supposed to do in the
project? If not, what's the job you are working on?

A nice cheap platform for software development of applications is a
Pocket
PC. If you buy a new one, it runs a customized version of Windows CE 5.0
with some other applications, called Windows Mobile 5. For that, you can
use VS2005 for development and C/C++, C#, or VB.NET.

Paul T.

"Robby" <Robby@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:2DCA00D6-46A1-4141-9545-B1CE5B99C115@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Hi,

I am a little discouraged and confused.

I am a <newbie> in the embeded world. I have been programming in C
using
the
WIN32 environment within the VC++ IDE. I eventually wish to program an
embeded application using a reference board which can support a WCE
image.

I will probably go with Visual studio 5 and the platform builder along
with
the WCE OS. I am planning to program with native languages such as
C/C++
with WIN32.

I have recently downloaded the trial version of Embeded WCE from the
microsoft site, and it installed WCE components and platform builder. I
have
not started to explore it though.

*QUESTIONS*

Q1-Can someone suggest me a vendor that can sell me a reference board
that
would complement the programming tools I currently have. (Visual
studio/EVC++)

Q2-What is exactly an SDK?

Q3-I have watched Mike Halls video at:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/wceintro5/html/wce50tutplatformbuildertutorials.asp

I viewed the last tutorial which is on WCE and he says a phrase I don't
quite understand. If you wish to view it, the phrase starts at 2
minutes
and
52 seconds of the video. Here is the phrase:

"The operating system its self is abstracted away from the in line
hardware
so in effect the components you choose from the WCE catalogue are
layered
on
top of the appropriate BSP at build time."

I don't know what a BSP is and what does he mean by this phrase?

Q4-When vendors sell their reference boards, do they also sell you
their
version of programming tools which replaces "Visual stidio/EVC++". Also
do
they sell you their version of platform builder?

In other words, can I just buy the board that they sell and use
Microsoft
programming tools to create my application?

Q5-How would I know if WCE would have all the libraries neccessary for
what
I want to do, ex: Play music, video and WIFI and hwo does the reference
board
relate to these hardware capabilities?

Thanking you in advance for your time!

--
Best regards
Robert





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