Everyone has had to deal with service calls at some time in their lives. If it's waiting at home between 9:00 in the morning and 4:00 in the evening for the cable guy to come and hook up your connection, or waiting for that phone call from the electrician so you can run home and meet him to fix a heater that's on the fritz, no matter how you slice it, waiting on a service call is a pain. emWare, hoping to relieve the world of this inconvenience, has developed some technology that will allow companies to manage devices remotely and eliminate the need for some physical visits. The DeviceGate-E connects to remotely located embedded devices and provides a gateway from those devices to your network, so you can find out what you need to know without having to leave your office.

Before hooking the DeviceGate-E up to work with your network, you need to make sure the devices you are connecting to are "network aware," which will allow them to speak with the DeviceGate. To create this environment, you'll need to program your devices and add some client application software -- which emWare can provide for you.

The DeviceGate-E runs the Linux OS on an X86-based single board computer. It has 16 MB RAM and 16 MB DiskOnChip, which contains DeviceGate-E embedded gateway software for communications. Speaking of communications, the DeviceGate-E communicates with other devices through RS232 or RS485 serial transports. Client applications can communicate with it using TCP/IP (Ethernet) or Point-to-Point (modem) protocols and transports.

After establishing communications with the device, what can you do? Well, with the emGatewayManager, a Web browser-based client application, you can configure and manage all of the subcomponents of the embedded gateway. emDeviceManager helps developers test and debug their device applications and includes a range of tools for remotely manipulating a device application's functions, variables, events, and files. The emMonitor is a command-line client application for Linux and Microsoft for developers to automate testing and debugging of device applications.

Not necessarily a plug-and-play device, emWare also offers the DeviceGate-E Development Kit so you can tune the device for your specific applications.

Pricing and Availability

Contact emWare for pricing on the DeviceGate-E. The DeviceGate-E Development Kit is currently available for $4,995.

(For access to more than 4,500 other hands-on product reviews on all variety of wired and wireless appliance and consumer devices, go to the iAppliance Web Portal Page. )