AN EMBEDDED DISTRIBUTED SYSTEM BASED ON TINE AND WINDOWS CE

We present an embedded distributed system based on the integration of the control system (TINE) inside an embedded-PC running Windows CE RTOS. As Windows CE is different to Desktop Windows and requires a cross-compilation of the source modules, porting TINE to Windows CE turned out to be straightforward, but non-trivial. Having a dedicated Windows CE TINE library allows to create device servers inside the embedded operating system, close to the hardware application layer. The embedded-PC is the master of the hardware line, where different hardware devices are connected through a real-time Ethernet field bus. On the one hand, there is a low level control of this hardware performed by a set of programmable logic controllers (PLC) running in fast cycling and on the other hand, there is a higher level control performed by the TINE server devices. The server is responsible for providing an interface to the external world, exporting the functionality of the system through the Ethernet control network. It is also possible that the server acts as a TINE client for other external servers, constituting a network of embedded nodes. We present a practical development that demonstrates the proposed system