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 the 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.
Electronics manufacturers operating best practice methods, will issue their customers end of life notices, and work with them to secure sufficient supplies to allow for a planned migration, to a new platform before stocks run out. This is very much how Veethree works, 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.
SOLD OUT M4 – 4.3″ Monochrome display no longer 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 relatively simple process to switch your supplier. Please talk to us if you would like to discuss last supply options for the current M4 display.
Migrating to a new display
Veethree manufacture a range of displays and the C3i from our C3-Series of 3.5″ colour CANbus displays could serve as a good replacement for the older M4 product. For volume OEM customers our expert in-house engineers can work with you to migrate to newer display platforms as necessary so changing hardware need not be a painful experience!
Get in touch to discuss your options.
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