Advantech PCM-3362 S/W Introduction, Driver Installation, Value-Added Software Services

4.1S/W Introduction

The mission of Advantech Embedded Software Services is to "Enhance quality of life with Advantech platforms and Microsoft Windows® embedded technology." We enable Windows® Embedded software products on Advantech platforms to more effectively support the embedded computing community. Customers are freed from the hassle of dealing with multiple vendors (Hardware suppliers, System integrators, Embedded OS distributor) for projects. Our goal is to make Windows® Embedded Software solutions easily and widely available to the embedded computing commu- nity.

4.2Driver Installation

4.2.1Windows XP professional

To install the drivers for Windows XP Professional, insert the CD into the CD-Rom, it will auto-detect the hardware platform and then pop up with the “Embedded Comput- ing Install Wizard” box; just select the drivers that you want to install then click “Install All Selected Drivers”. Follow the Driver Setup Wizard instructions; click "Next" to complete the installation.

4.2.2Other OS

To install the drivers for Other Windows OS or Linux, please browse the CD to run the setup file under each chipset folder on the CD-ROM.

4.3Value-Added Software Services

4.3.1SUSI Introduction

To make hardware easier and convenient to access for programmers, Advantech has released a suite of API (Application Programming Interface) in the form of a program library. The program Library is called Secured and Unified Smart Interface or SUSI for short.

In modern operating systems, user space applications cannot access hardware directly. Drivers are required to access hardware. User space applications access hardware through drivers. Different operating systems usually define different inter- face for drivers. This means that user space applications call different functions for hardware access in different operating systems. To provide a uniform interface for accessing hardware, an abstraction layer is built on top of the drivers and SUSI is such an abstraction layer. SUSI provides a uniform API for application programmers to access the hardware functions in different Operating Systems and on different Advantech hardware platforms.

Application programmers can invoke the functions exported by SUSI instead of call- ing the drivers directly. The benefit of using SUSI is portability. The same set of API is defined for different Advantech hardware platforms. Also, the same set of API is implemented in different Operating Systems including Windows XP and Windows CE. This user’s manual describes some sample programs and the API in SUSI. The hardware functions currently supported by SUSI can be grouped into a few catego-

ries including Watchdog, I2C, SMBus, GPIO, and VGA control. Each category of API in SUSI is briefly described below.

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