SIM562 High Performance 7″ HMI Modules Shipping

Serious Integrated, Inc. is now shipping the first of the anticipated 5th Generation of Serious Integrated HMI Modules. The 7″ SIM562 features various 800×480 color LCD options and is powered by a Renesas RZ/G1E MPU with dual 1GHz ARM Cortex A7 cores and 128MB of DDR3-1333 RAM, offering unprecedented front panel performance.

For additional details, visit the SIM562 Product Page.

New Family of Serious Integrated HMI Modules Using Renesas Synergy™ MCUs

Synergy S7G2 Group MCUs with a 240MHz ARM® Cortex®-M4 CPU now power new modules that pair with existing Serious SCM208 communication modules for fully integrated, cloud-based IoT connectivity

Today, Serious Integrated, Inc. announced initial availability of its first Renesas Synergy™-powered Serious Integrated Module family, enabling engineers working in a broad mix of application segments to rapidly develop rich, capacitive touch-enabled, graphical user interfaces for the control panels of electronic systems. By adding new modules based on Synergy microcontrollers (MCUs) from the powerful S7G2 Group to the previous families of Serious modules, older HMI designs port over with minimal effort to the new platform, taking advantage of improved price/performance and enabling new feature extensions not previously available.

The first member of the new module family is the SIM243, featuring a 4.3″ 480×272 24-bit color TFT LCD display powered by a S7G2 Group MCU and includes on module memory extensions, extensive I/O, support for a wide operating range and targeted for a 10+ year customer availability lifetime. Another family member, the SIM543, which increases the TFT LCD size to 7.0″, will be available in early Q3 2016.

Serious Integrated Modules are off-the-shelf graphic/touch front panel OEM modules, designed for inclusion in OEM devices with connection through a simple UART (or SPI) and power connection from the existing system. The no-cost Serious proprietary Serious Human Interface™ Platform (SHIP) rapid GUI development tools can deliver modern-looking GUIs remarkably quickly and easily.

OEMs can also develop C-based Human Machine Interface (HMI) solutions using the innovative Synergy Platform. Introduced in June 2015, the Synergy Platform is an easy-to-use platform for embedded systems enabling developers to start their work at the API level while providing qualified software that is professionally maintained and runs on a broad family of scalable Synergy MCUs.

“Using the Serious Human Interface Platform (SHIP) on these new modules delivers unprecedented HMI development speed at new price/performance levels,” said Terry West, CEO at Serious Integrated, Inc. “Extending our products to incorporate Synergy MCUs enhances our ongoing partnership with Renesas, delivering more HMI hardware and software options for OEMs to reduce development time and increase differentiation.”

“As a member of the Renesas Alliance Partner Program, Serious Integrated understands the core challenges OEM equipment designers face, including accelerating time to market and focusing innovation efforts on differentiating features,” said Semir Haddad, Director of Marketing, MCU and MPU Product Solutions, Renesas Electronics America Inc. “We are pleased to expand this collaboration and welcome Serious to our network of Synergy Platform hardware development partners.”

Windows XP Support Ends

Microsoft has publicly announced for 4 years the April 8th, 2014 End of Life (EOL) of the Windows XP operating system. This includes “XP mode” within Windows 7.

Given the significant risk to data, network integrity, and PC stability posed by the lack of security updates to XP after this date, Serious has support of any Serious software products, including SHIPTide for SHIPv4, on Windows XP after April 8, 2014. There are too many opportunities for these security issues to create support issues we cannot solve and we also risk exposing our own networks to these security risks in the process of debugging/supporting customer issues.