“Industrial Single Board Computer adoption in a Parking Automation System: an experimental development performance evaluation"

The emerging trend of replacing proprietary embedded microcontroller boards with industrial single board computers (SBC) in automation applications appears an attractive product management choice. This choice allows the automation system vendors to take advantage of much more available skills in the job market. While the traditional embedded microcontroller boards in fact require the increasingly hard-to-find skills of C language firmware developers, the new industrial SBCs just demand the skills of Visual Studio C# language programmers on the Windows operating system, which are widely available in the job market. However the well-known stability of microcontroller embedded firmware against the questionable robustness of Windows-based software appears an open issue in such an hardware asset migration. The thesis experimentally analyzes this issue taking advantage of an internship program in a parking automation company managing the transition from the Rabbit Semiconductors BL4S2xx microcontroller board to the PICO ITX-type industrial SBC as a core hardware asset. The work specifically focused on the device driver porting from the old to the new hardware environment and the analysis offers an useful and impartial insight of the hardware transition pros and cons.