Wind River Launches Development Kits for Embedded Apps

Wind River partners with its ecosystem to deliver embedded-development kits that give developers a head start on building applications.

Wind River, a maker of embedded and mobile software, has partnered with its ecosystem of processor board vendors to offer up embedded development kits that enable developers to begin application development in less than one hour versus what traditionally can take days or weeks, the company said.

According to the Wind River press release, as part of the new program, called the Wind River On-Board Program, the kits comprise processor boards with optimized trial versions of Wind River's operating systems, development tools, and embedded hypervisor and graphics software. Embedded development kits from Emerson Network Power, Eurotech and Kontron are available as of Sept. 8; additional kits from Advantech, ADLINK, Curtiss-Wright Controls Embedded Computing, GE Intelligent Platforms and RadiSys will be available in fourth quarter of 2010.

Each kit includes a bootable USB flash drive that immediately turns any host computer into a fully integrated development environment, or IDE, with no installation required, say Wind River. Each commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) processor board comes with a pre-flashed 30-day run-time trial version of Wind River's VxWorks real-time operating system and/or Wind River Linux. The software from Wind River is optimized for developing, running, debugging and prototyping embedded software directly onto the chosen COTS processor board using Wind River Workbench. Options including trial versions of Wind River Hypervisor; Wind River Tilcon Graphics Suite is also available, depending on the specific kit configuration.

"Wind River and its board vendor partners have worked diligently for the past year to formalize an out-of-the-box hardware and software solution that provides our joint customers with a foundation to begin innovating in minutes rather than in weeks," said Barry Mainz, chief operating officer at Wind River, in a statement. "To achieve the desired results required new thinking and some innovative technology. We are extremely pleased with the outcome, and the reaction from initial partners and customers has been overwhelmingly positive. We are confident our joint customers will greatly benefit by not only mitigating risks associated with software integration but by accelerating time-to-productivity."

Eurotech is one of the inaugural ecosystem members of the Wind River On-Board Program, validating multiple embedded computing boards and platforms from Eurotech's product line, including the Catalyst LP computer-on-module and Helios edge controller platform, for a total of six Eurotech products available to order now. The first embedded development kits run Intel processors, including Series Z5xx and higher speed N450 single-core and D510 dual-core processors.

"We have been working closely with Wind River, and today's announcement formalizes our tight collaboration," said Arlen Nipper, chief technology officer of Eurotech in North America. "We've recently completed development efforts to ensure our Intel Atom processor-based product line can not only run a standard Wind River Linux BSP, but that each OS available on our products has been optimized to our individual platforms.

"Now we can offer Wind River Linux 3.0x kernels on many of our Intel Atom-based platforms as fully validated implementations of Wind River Linux with a pre-licensed kernel run-time, which will mitigate risks associated with software integration and rapidly increase time-to-market."

Each kit is customized with a startup guide and a set of step-by-step tutorials that walk the user through use cases and workflows intended to make the developer productive in a matter of hours, using the self-directed documentation, play-by-play videos, or both.

According to Chris Rommel, senior analyst at VDC Research Group: "We are beginning to see a shift in the embedded market, where engineering organizations are considering a more integrated hardware and software approach in an effort to extract efficiencies and improve time-to-market. What Wind River and its board partners have delivered caters to this demand and can help companies consolidate their ecosystems and provide the embedded market with something closer to the out-of-the-box PC-development experience."