Kontron nanoETXexpress-SP
Emerson MATXM-CORE-411-WR
Eurotech Catalyst FX
Wind River is now delivering its Embedded Development Kits (EDK) for a range of third party platforms. The EDKs combine Wind River's development platform and operating systems with development boards from the likes of Emerson Network Power, Eurotech and Kontron. The idea is to have developers up and running in as little as fifteen minutes.
Wind River stacks the deck by providing both sides in preconfigured forms. For the host development side, Wind River has a bootable USB drive with all the tools and target board support packages (BSP) for the matching target hardware. The target hardware has a 30-day trial version of either Wind River Linux or Wind River VxWorks plus any vendor-specific features. For example, Eurotech's Everyware (see Developers Can Expect To See Everyware Everywhere) is found on its platforms.
Getting up and running is a matter of connecting the target board to a laptop, booting the USB drive on a laptop that is connected to the target board, and start developing and debugging. It is likely to take a bit more time to understand the features of the operating system and target board but developers will not have to take lots of time trying to get the basic system working.
The USB drive boots a version of Fedora Linux. The development tools include Wind River's Eclipse-based Workbench. Wind River's tools run on a number of platforms including Fedora Linux and Microsoft Windows 7. Developers can runs strictly off the USB drive and save projects on it. They can also install the development tools on a hard drive. It is even possible to boot the USB drive in a virtual machine.
The configurations include the setup necessary to handle JTAG debugging. There are also sample configuration and applications so developers are not starting from scratch.
Wind River is expecting to deliver EDKs for a range of vendors and platforms. Some of the EDK versions available immediately include Kontron's nanoETXexpress-SP, Emerson Network Power's MATXM-CORE-411-WR Embedded Development Kit for Wind River Hypervisor and Eurotech's Catalyst FX Embedded Development Kit for Wind River Linux.
Wind River has set the bar for development kits. Few match the EDKs out-of-box experience. It will be interesting to see how the competition responds to this initiative.