With technology ever changing one of the biggest challenges for electronics manufactures is maintaining supplies of components for its oldest products. While compatible or updated components can often serve as replacements this is not always the case and when a solution cannot be found it triggers end of life (EOL) of the product.

This is the case for the long standing Monochrome M4 4.3″ display, which over its lifetime has been known as a variety of names including the CANvu™ 260 & 261, CANtrak™ 2600 & 2610, KAntrak™ 2700 and 2710, and Teleflex™ i5600. When this first display was first created in circa 2005 by the engineers at what was then Teleflex, it featured leading technology for its time. Since then it has gone through various model revisions as component scarcity meant a more significant change.

Hardware changes can also mean changes to the software layer that brings the display product to life, this has been seen with model changes and backwards compatibility cannot always been maintained due to the hardware architecture, which requires then software applications written for one model to be migrated to the latest variant. In more extreme scenarios software may need to be entirely re-written. This of course gives the opportunity to be able to revisit older designed interfaces using new graphics, and adding new features such as telematics.

Electronics manufacturers operating best practice methods will issue their customers end of life notices and work with them to secure sufficient supplies to allow a planned migration to a new platform before stocks run out. This is very much how Veethree work, typically offering a rolling 10 year product longevity and a managed migration path when EOL is notified. Not all manufacturers are created equal and if you are one of those M4 equivalent displays at EOL Veethree can help.

Last buy stocks of M4 – 4.3″ Monochrome display available

With careful forward planning Veethree is in a strong position to support customers struggling to obtain stocks of the monochrome display from their usual vendor.

Provided customers have their original source code/binary files or are able to use the standard Engine Monitor application it is usually a simple process to switch your supplier. Please talk to us if you would like to discuss last supply options for the current M4 display.