First, you wait weeks for your board to arrive so you can start building a new GUI. The designer works on it in your office in Denver, then ships it to the developer who works from home in Hawaii. After a shipping delay and then hours of time confirming the system set up in Hawaii matches the one in Denver, the developer finally gets the board and finishes programming. The developer ships the board to the product manager in Germany for review, but there’s a problem.
Somewhere between Hawaii and Germany, the development board flashed with the GUI design is lost in shipment. You can file a claim and get reimbursed for the cost of the board, but you are now back in line, waiting for a new supply to become available. Your product manager needs to sign off on the design before it can be ready for production—and, based on the lead time of your board, you know that you will miss the delivery date for your GUI.
If these headaches sound all too familiar, CloudWare™ offers good news for you. Here is how we solve seven critical challenges faced by embedded GUI teams.
1. Chip Shortage
Whether it takes weeks or months to get the specific chip you need to build your solution, the chip shortage has become a serious problem in recent years. CloudWare™ is helping GUI teams solve the chip shortage problem and meet production schedules. Rather than waiting until your chip comes in before you can move forward, you can get everything set up on CloudWare™.
Within five minutes, you can test your design on real hardware. You’ll have a real-time operating system and the toolchain to begin your design, development and evaluation. You don’t have to wait for weeks to test a chip anymore. CloudWare™ helps you find the appropriate chip and run a virtual machine to confirm your hardware selection before you place an order.
2. Supply Chain Issues
Even beyond the chip shortage, supply chain issues are making it harder to get what you need. If you can’t get a particular chip or get it in time, you might have to find a suitable replacement. Here at Altia, we pride ourselves on being able to run on any device, but you shouldn’t have to take our word for it.
CloudWare™ lets you confirm that your design works on other chips similar to the one you originally wanted. Whenever you want to try new hardware, you can access the CloudWare™ portal to test your design on hardware, and then work within the platform from start of project all the way to go-to-market (GTM). This also makes for a much more collaborative development environment.
3. Distributed Teams
The days of getting everyone together in the same office are long gone at most companies, which is creating challenges. Your remote designer in Hawaii might have a different board configuration than what you’ll use in production. When you work in the cloud, everyone works with the same board.
Stakeholders from all over the world can work together in real-time, accelerating collaboration. The product manager can see the GUI as it’s built, so no one ends up surprised that the design is blue instead of green. You also don’t have to ship boards from Hawaii to Germany anymore (and risk the board getting lost or bricked in the process).
4. Shipping Costs, Board Costs, Labor Costs
If you can build on a Raspberry Pi, ordering an extra board or two won’t break the bank. It’s a different story when your boards cost thousands of dollars each. CloudWare™ prevents you from having to buy several boards just to determine which is the right fit.
Then there’s the cost of shipping the boards. This cost shouldn’t be prohibitive if everything goes according to plan, but things happen. Boards get delayed, lost or damaged. Every delay or inefficient process is a waste of time, and time is money.
CloudWare™ is helping GUI teams get started while they wait on the boards they need for production. The time you spend waiting on shipments isn’t dead time because designers and developers can keep working. Not only can you try before you buy, but you can also design, test and validate before you have all of the hardware.
You can only start generating revenue after you produce a final product, and CloudWare™ gets you there faster (while managing costs along the way).
5. Disparate Hardware-Software Stacks
Just as distributed teams cause challenges, so do disparate hardware and software stacks. Finding the right setup often takes a while. There’s a lot of time spent reading documentation, experimenting with different setup processes and learning through trial and error. CloudWare™ helps eliminate a lot of effort, frustration and redundancy.
You get the right software with the right toolchains from the start, and everything is set up for you. There’s less time spent figuring out how to make your hardware and software solutions work together, which means more time building the best GUI possible. And your team can get straight into the core work more quickly.
Introducing CloudWare™!
Embedded GUI design and development teams find that CloudWare™ is easy to use. Most teams can use it without engineering services or additional support, especially if they have previous experience with embedded GUI development. Once Altia sets you up with a virtual machine through CloudWare™, you’re ready for self-service on our hosted hardware. It’s just like having the board in your office. Even better, you can test it now, with no upfront costs.
If your team needs a little more help getting up to speed, Altia is there to support you at every step. No matter where you get stuck, from ideation to GTM, we can help. This support is beneficial for teams without embedded GTM development experience. Maybe you only need a hand with the initial design or performance optimization. You can lean on our experts as much or as little as you need to throughout the process.
Are you ready to find new solutions to your GUI production challenges? Request a demo of Alita CloudWare™ today.
