How can Xembedded help you with replacing an End-Of-Life module?

About a year ago Xembedded was approached by a company that designs and manufactures a system that is enclosed in those little metal shacks next to the railroad tracks all over the world. Those shacks hold equipment that ensures the safety of our railroad system looking at things like train car wheels, brake hoses, speed of the train cars, temperature of the rails, weight of the cars and other items that could affect the safety of the public and the rail system.

An out of round train car wheel can damage the track and can cause a derailment of the whole train. Using transducers on the track, this system picks up the signature of the wheels rolling past and reports any irregularities to a central location. The system was built around a SBS VR7 processor board that uses a custom P2 pin out for the rear I/O and the chassis uses a custom backplane to connect the rear I/O. When the VR7 processor was End-Of-Life, it left this manufacture without a system processor, necessitating an immediate redesign, unless a solution could be found.

I once worked for an engineering manager that said, “with infinite time and cubic money we can do anything…. but we don’t have either”. This was very true in this case; the customer needed a solution and did not have the luxury of time and a lot of NRE money.

This customer needed a drop-in, pin-for-pin replacement board eliminating the need for new chassis, backplanes and wiring in the rail side systems. Some of these systems are so remote in location that the service personnel needed to backpack everything to the site so reliability along with the ability to live in extreme hot and cold climates without fans was an absolute requirement. In addition their system requirement had grown through the years with the growth of their application code; more memory and a faster CPU were on the list of new requirements along with a more accurate Time-Of-Day clock.

Xembedded worked closely with this customer to develop a drop in replacement with the added features for very little NRE and a low commitment of orders for the custom modules.

Let Xembedded help you with your End-Of –Life module replacement needs. Don’t let a single module going EOL in your system send you into a complete system redesign. Contact us at sales@xembedded.com.

Phone us at 1-888-944-1942 or 1-734-975-0577 or at http://www.xembedded.com.

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