Cortexa announces affordable touchscreen/PC

[Dean Roddey]

Dwayne,

I sent you a PM, but jsut in case you didn't see it or don't have e-mail notifications turned on, please drop me a line at [email protected].

 

[arock]

Dwyne,
Your point is well taken. It seams like every forum, everyone starts comparing pricing, and do not realize what they are comparing. When someone compares a monitor, versuse a complete soution, and says theres is cheaper, then it makes the whole industry look bad.

 

[Foosh]

http://www.cortexatechnology.com/12touchspecs.php

Not sure what to think about the specs tho, they are a little odd.

Hmm... interesting. The specs say 1GHz processor. I see no heatsink and no mention of "fanless", so I'll assume it has a fan. Fan = another moving part which creates noise and is a common point of failure. The acoustic wave touchscreen sounds neat. I do like the options of colors as well.

One thing I noticed is that there seems to be only one 12Volt power input on this unit as shown in their picture. I can easily see how a low voltage solution would work, but what about a standard 100-240VAC solution like they advertise on their specs page?
http://www.cortexatechnology.com/12touchspecs.php
What high voltage soluion is there unless they would have you run romex to a power supply (brick) inside the wall which is against res and comm building code. .. and how would you connect the romex to the AC/DC brick ? .. put a junction box inside the wall? That's not an acceptable AC solution. Anyone else have the details on this?

Another thing I noticed is the dimensions of the unit don't seem to make sense. Let's say you decide to actually use the Serial and USB ports on the unit. How would you ever slide it into the wall without having to cut a hole that is entirely too large? By the measurements shown in their drawings there are only 1.51 inches available between the box (I/O ports) and the lip of the faceplate. I'm sure most of you reading this have seen a DB9 and USB connector before. It seems that the Serial and USB connectors would be way to big to actually connect and then slide the unit into a pre-cut whole; the connectors (and attached cable) will surely extend beyond the lip of the faceplate. I couldn't find any specs on their mounting solution either.

See what I mean:

 

[electron]

I would think you would slide the unit in, but in an angle, starting with the bottom part. It's definitely an interesting product, make sure you stop by this Friday when we have a live chat with these guys!

 

[jbdww]

Hello,
This is my first time to reply on this site. I look forward to the chat on Friday. There will be a couple of us on the chat Friday.

Up to this point we have been under the radar only selling in our area to mostly learn from builders, end user, and integrators to get a huge understanding of what is needed to get a mass market solution out there. This is by far not an easy task.

The product has been under heavy development by our development team for over four years.

I saw this post and would like to answer some of the questions before Friday. Our web site is still under development as we are still getting ready to push the product very soon to the rest of the country, and it is good to see question in this forum to help us make our web site clear.

Foosh,
The first pciture you are showing is our Central Controller. We are going to release a new desing in one month that will make the unit 100% fanless, and the chase will look much different.
On the touch screen, the only connection you will need is 12VDC, and one Cat-5 for the network, so the wire will be very small.

Other Questions.
The touch screen does have one CPU fan, which we did attempt to use a fanless motherboard, but once they where placed in a sealed wall, they got to hot. If you wont fanless, we can still do a fanless version for specail orders, but special care will need to be taken for air flow. It is still on our efforts to make it fanless at the same cost.
The touch screen is running Linux, off of a flash card, so we can avoid viruses, and spy ware, and since it is on a flash card, we do not have to worry about hot hard drives going bad.
We developed the Touch Screen, just for an access point for our Central Controller that was requested by several of the local integrators.
The price that we set for this product is set based on integrators wonting some kind of margins. As any new product, as time goes on and volume starts coming in, this price will for sure get lower.

The hart of our company and the excitement is in our Central Control which will be well talked about on Friday.

Thanks
Joe

 

[Rupp]

I thought flash cards had a limited number of read writes before going bad? At the rate that most PC's read and write bits wouldn't this limit be reached quite quickly?

 

[electron]

It isn't as bad anymore as it used to be, but there are plenty of work arounds for that, i.e. using a ramdisk, and store frequently accessed files (if not the entire OS) on there.

 

[elcano]

It isn't as bad anymore as it used to be, but there are plenty of work arounds for that, i.e. using a ramdisk, and store frequently accessed files (if not the entire OS) on there.

Puppy Linux works exactly this way. It can be installed in a flash drive and everything runs in rams until you do a shutdown, when everything is stored once in the flash memory.

 

[jbdww]

Most flash memory have a write cycle of 1 Million changes per bit, and if that one bit goes bad, then it is marked as bad and is not used any more, so even if you write to the same byte with a counter, it will take years to make the one bit to go bad.

You also may notice that most flash cards have a 10 Year Warranty. There are drive companies out there like Seagate that is making hybrid drives that are part flash and part hard drive to take advantage of this reliability.

If there is a setback of a flash card, and that is access time, they are a little bit slow.

All of our products take compressed images of the OS and loads them into RAM drives, and everything runs from the RAM drive, and the flash card is set for read only. The only time there is access to the flash card, is to store new settings, or updating the software. By doing this there is a very low risk of a corrupted or fragmented disk, so if something goes wrong, you can restart the hardware (if the hardware watchdog has not already done so), and start fresh.

This product has 128Mb of memory, and only 1/4 of that memory is used where our previous 10" touch screen that we still have at half the cost of this one, had only 64 MB of ram and only used half of that memory for both the RAM drive, and the program space.

Thanks
Joe