Ahh, now we're getting somewhere. This is a decent question.
"Say I wanted to develop an embedded system that required a GUI, had
multithreading and networking capabilities. I assume there are other packages available that would help you develop this without writing everything from scratch. Services in the embedded OS, I would guess. Am i correct here?"
First of all, the OS of an embedded system is its instruction set. The concept of operating system doesn't really fit very well in the embedded world. By nature, embedded systems handle the applications that don't require the system resources normally found in computer systems.
However, we will see some crossover products that try to blur the lines which have normally separated the two worlds. For these products, CE could possibly have a market. However, one of my major concerns is that these products will somehow end up in the industrial control world with disastrous results.
The most common approach I've seen is to let the tried and true control systems do their thing, and let the GUI systems do theirs. Connect the two with a serial interface and you have the best of both worlds. GUI systems are used everywhere, but I don't think you will find too many designers willing to include the GUI fluff in the same processing hardware that controls critical real-time systems.
But, for hybrid applications which need to do both, and don't need to handle industrial or medical equipment, such as network computer terminals, we have a possible market. These hybrid applications, in my opinion, are nothing more than computers who need to run without some of the storage hardware we are used to seeing in PCs. Basically, we're talking about stripped-down PCs which would be running a GUI "OS" anyway.
Still, I would do it myself, from scratch, if it were my design, unless it was a product that needed to look and act like a PC running Windows. Shortcuts aren't always the easy way out they seem to be. I don't want to pay Microsoft a licensing fee for something I don't need. |
