EFCO Industrial Computers Supports Real-Time Systems Hypervisor as Industry 4.0 Accelerator

EFCO, a world-class supplier of industrial PC, gaming and EMS solutions, announced that its Eagle Eyes fanless industrial computers product line supports Real-Time Systems’ Real-Time Hypervisor, a global manufacturer of hypervisor technology to provide innovative hypervisor and partitioning software, which increases flexibility and functionality for factory automation.

The virtual machines with Real-Time Hypervisor software makes it possible to consolidate the different tasks on a single edge computing platform. OEMs just need to load their control data to the real-time virtual machine (VM), and to communicate in real-time with IIoT/Industry 4.0 counterparts to enable tactile internet controls. This real-time operating system (RTOS) can use a virtual Ethernet interface to send data to an application on the GPOS. There, the data is compressed and sent to higher-level systems via OPC UA. These systems can also be located in the cloud.

“Customers used to need at least two computers to coordinate timely workflows and gather data with performance; one is serving an application’s real-time needs on RTOS; another is running a general-purpose operating system (GPOS) such as Linux or Windows. It is costly and makes it difficult to obtain a holistic view of all ongoing operations. It is also difficult to enhance automation mechanism and preventive maintenance,” stated Bryan Lin, General Manager of EFCO. “The collaboration between EFCO and Real-Time Systems has been a true win-win situation. EFCO’s full intelligent hardware platform is now validated to support Real-Time Hypervisor with pre complete compatibility test, and it will help our times to spend less effort and gain more reliability.”

The Real-Time Hypervisor software can run on any of EFCO Eagle Eyes fanless industrial computers from entry series with an Intel Atom processor to the advanced series with an Intel Xeon processor.

About EFCO Eagle Eyes Industrial Computers

Eagle Eyes Embedded Vision System is a family of fanless industrial computers that is task optimized for the extreme performance requirements of image processing such as machine vision, industrial image processing and factory automation. It’s compact size also makes it ideal for space-constrained applications.  In addition, because reliability is critical in vision systems applications, EFCO incorporates artificial intelligence into its devices through its eKit software to detect problems and trigger predictive maintenance.