Timesys Launches Embedded Board Farm, Providing Shared Remote Access to Hardware — Timesys Corporation
PITTSBURGH – June 7, 2021 – PRLog — Timesys Corporation, an industry pioneer and a leading provider of embedded, open-source software, engineering services, and security solutions, today announced the launch of their Embedded Board Farm (EBF).
Timesys’ Embedded Board Farm provides a secured, user-owned infrastructure solution for remote access to hardware for software development, test automation, and debugging across an organization.
The EBF puts project hardware and Board Support Packages (BSPs) for any embedded operating system (Linux, Android, QNX, FreeRTOS and others) at users’ fingertips by providing secure remote access for developers, testers, support engineers, sales engineers and others, anywhere in the world, at any time.
Unlike solutions that only provide access to simulated project hardware, the EBF provides remote access to live hardware, ensuring that teams are working with real products. This is done by using a centralized server that grants users full control of the devices, as if the live hardware were sitting next to them. Everything sits behind the company’s firewall, ensuring all products are secure even when accessed remotely.
A company producing embedded hardware and software-based products typically faces many challenges: limited access to physical boards for development teams, fragmented, redundant test infrastructure for automation, and low availability of hardware access for demos and customer evaluation. For device makers, hardware access can be a bottleneck that limits device development and testing productivity, lengthens time-to-market, and drives up product development costs.
“These problems become worse for distributed teams, whether they are in the same building, among different companies, or spread across the world,” says Timesys CEO Atul Bansal. “And with many companies considering a permanent move to working remotely, the need for remote access to hardware boards has never been greater. Our Embedded Board Farm provides unlimited board access so every team member has the access they need.”
Lineo Solutions Inc., a leading embedded Linux solution provider based in Japan, knows this problem well. “Many of our automotive customers use hardware boards both in Japan and other countries across the world, and their distributed teams need to collaborate on development and debugging,” says Akira Kobayashi, President and Director of Lineo Solutions. “Timesys’ Embedded Board Farm provides the perfect solution allowing for quick, shared access to hardware and therefore quick turnaround on projects.”
According to Timesys, EBF users cut hardware-access-
Timesys Embedded Board Farm allows users to:
- Collaborate and work remotely on software development, test automation, debugging, and sales demos efficiently
- See all inputs & outputs, live encrypted video/audio streaming, securely behind a firewall
- Share boards with multi-user access to facilitate collaboration between team members on shared hardware
- Stay in their preferred workflow for debugging and automate processes for testing with EBF command line interface
Companies utilizing embedded systems need to release stable, high quality products, which means extensive testing is usually required despite compressed development and delivery schedules.
Embedded Board Farm allows users to streamline and accelerate testing and quality assurance with test automation framework plugins. EBF includes integration with test systems and frameworks such as Fuego, Squish and the Timesys Test Project to enable test coverage including UI, and to allow for higher efficiency and collaboration across geographies.
“This tool is exactly what we’ve been looking for,” said Reginald Stadlbauer, Business Development Director, QA Tools at Qt. “Using Timesys EBF along with our Squish GUI Test Automation Tool, our customers are able to automate remote UI testing on the actual hardware, even with different versions of boards at multiple locations, saving them time and money. There is nothing else like this on the market.”
Timesys’ Embedded Board Farm eliminates hardware access bottlenecks for higher efficiency and reduced budget and schedule; shortens test cycles with test automation framework plugins; and allows teams to remotely develop and debug BSPs from anywhere in the world.
Request a personalized Embedded Board Farm demo here: https://www.timesys.com/
