MISC-TN-002: The scalability of the Axel family: a real-world example

Info Box Applies to Axel Lite Applies to AXEL ULite

History

Version	Date	Notes
1.0.0	December 2017	First release

Introduction

One of the most appreciated characteristics of the Axel family is the scalability in terms of performances and feature set. This technical note illustrates a real-world example in which this scalability was heavily exploited by DAVE Embedded Systems to produce an entire family of products originated from a common hardware project and sharing a unified software development environment. All of this allowed our customer to reduce dramatically the time-to-market and to limit the software maintenance costs.

The hardware platform

The following image depicts the simplified block diagram of the hardware platform.

caption

It was designed around the system-on-module, indicated as SOM in the picture. As stated before, the range of the SOMs fitting this application is considerable. It embraces both the compact AXEL ULite class of products and the more powerful AxelLite class.

Thanks to the substantial pinout and form factor compatibility, the hardware design team managed to conceive a "one-size-fits-all" solution. In other words, a single carrier board able to host all the selected SOMs was designed.

Several factors differentiate the final products which are the result of different carrier board/SOM/application software combinations. Clear examples of these factors are the size and the resolution of the supported LCD screen which range from 7" @ 800x480 to 15.6" @ 1920x1080.

The unified software development environment

From the software development standpoint, two

• The board support package (BSP), including the bootloader, the Linux kernel, etc.
• The main user application which is based on the Qt 5.9.2 libraries.

As previously stated,