S4 Open Appliances Availability

We received a call Tuesday morning from Advantech telling us that they were notified by AMD that manufacturing was ceasing immediately on the Geode 400 processor that Advantech uses in the UNO 2059E industrial PC that we host the S4 Open appliances on. Advantech, and their distributor, is working very closely with us to get this issue resolved with minimal impact to our customers and integration partners. We are taking a multi-pronged approach to solve the delivery problems.

Advantech is searching their distributor network for any UNO 2059E systems in stock that could be pulled back and re-allocated to S4
We are immediately taking delivery of existing 2059E stock to meet an immediate customer need.
We are working closely with Advantech to determine the best fit system to move to for our larger N2 routers.
Advantech is expediting their efforts to get the issues that our developers found with the TPC-30T resolved quickly so that we can move the smaller systems to this platform. This was the originally targeted platform for the smaller systems so this part of the plan should be straight forward.

The N2 Router software was designed to be modular and portable so this transition should happen very quickly. We'll keep you informed as we make progress resolving this issue.

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#1 Steve Jones 2010-10-14 14:32

Advantech and our distributor have been working very closely with us to get this issue resolved. We have selected a target for the replacement hardware platform and are now digging into the details to make sure that this will work as well as we think it will.

There are no Advantech UNO-2050E systems in inventory so shipments are in limbo until this issue is resolved. Talk about incentive to find a solution fast!

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#2 Steve Jones 2010-10-21 11:47

We are making good progress with Advantech on the hardware replacement selection. We have targeted two hardware platforms. One will be used for small to medium size systems, the other for larger systems. They are still sending us technical details about the system internals and we expect to receive the Board Support Package today. That will enable us to start working on the software port. I’ve signed an evaluation P.O. for the platform we are using for small to medium systems to have them ship test units. They should arrive early next week. We will be ready to start testing as soon as those units arrive. I suspect that we should be able to get a firm schedule for when we can resume deliveries by the end of next week. Test versions of the hardware platform for the full size system replacement is scheduled to arrive in early November. We are hopeful that the platform for small to medium sized systems will satisfy all but the most demanding applications. This will be determined soon after we start testing.

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#3 Steve Jones 2010-11-01 09:12

We have received tracking numbers for the first shipment of the targeted new platform for small and medium sized S4 Open appliances. System are scheduled to arrive tomorrow. Testing will start as soon as these systems arrive. The new platforms are from Advantech and have a very similar form factor to the previous platform. The target platform for the larger appliances is not very far behind this one. One of the things that we like about the specs of the new platforms is that they all support USB 2.0. No more concerns about if your USB Thumb Drive is USB 1.1 compatible. :-)

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#4 Steve Jones 2010-11-03 06:53

The initial ARK-1310F systems arrived from Advantech yesterday. Our first impression is that Advantech did a fine job on this platform.

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#5 Steve Jones 2010-11-18 07:44

Klaus and his development team are making progress with generating a bare bones CE 5.0 OS for the ARK-1310F system. This will conserve the precious little memory on these systems so that the application can utilize as much as possible. The ARK-1310F is taqrgeted for the small to mid size S4 Open appliances. How far up the product chain this platform is utilized depends on the results of our QA and stress testing after the application port is complete. We do have this hardware platform in house so our testing can start as soon as the developers complete the heavy lifting.

We are expecting the first UNO-2059GL system today so that we can start testing it. This should be straight forward becasue the major change is an upgrade of the, now obsolete, GEODE 400 processor. Advantech has been aggressively working on getting the manufacturing process ramped up for this system. Within a few days we should know when they can start delivering these platforms to us.

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#6 Steve Jones 2010-11-19 05:51

The first sample UNO-2059GL arrived yesterday as expected. So far, testing is going well. We were able to load our firmware into the box and the basic administrative features are working. Our management console (an application running on a Windows PC to provide the system UI) can talk to our application running on the UNO-2059GL. The system status comes up as running in “Service” mode. That is expected at this time since we needed to have our developers generate a certificate for us to enable full application capability. This was received this morning and testing will resume as soon as we have it installed.

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#7 Steve Jones 2010-11-20 07:38

After installing the certificate the UNO-2059GL successfully goes to the next stage of system startup.It starts the process of initializing the serial I/O subsystem. We found that the I/O subsystem must have a slightly different configuration than the 2059E. We'll need to wait for a hardware specific variation of our code from the developers to move to the next stage of testing.

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#8 Steve Jones 2010-11-21 21:11

A quick note on what we saw in #7 above. We previously transitioned from the 2059SGA, to the 2059HDA, and 2059GDA while the S4 Open appliances were under development. Because of this all of the hardware dependent segments of code are well understood and isolated into one module in the source code tree. This means that the symptoms that we just saw are well understood and it is likely that we will soon have the S4 Open appliances running on this platform.

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#9 Steve Jones 2010-11-22 12:58

We have great news to report. I received a test build for the UNO-2059GL platform from Klaus and his development team this morning. Testing is just getting underway but I can report that the system is properly initializing the I/O ports, we are successfully discovering N2 devices, we can read points from the Management Console, and the BACnet interface is working properly with the first BACnet client. Testing will continue while we work in parallel with Advantech to determine the manufacturing ramp up schedule for 2059GL platforms.

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#10 Steve Jones 2010-11-23 11:40

I received word from Advantech this morning that they are ready to start processing orders for UNO-2059GL hardware. Current expected delivery to the Advantech U.S. facility is Dec. 16th. They will work on expediting the deliveries as soon as they have P.O.s in hand. Orders were submitted today to fill all back orders plus some systems to refresh our local inventory.

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