Fire alarm control panel

A leading manufacturer of fire protection solutions was looking for a suitable HMI solution for the development of a new fire alarm control panel.

The SBC to be used in the HMI in particular had to meet special requirements in terms of resilience. The strict specifications for product solutions in this category are issued by VdS Schadensverhütung GmbH. These include:

• double fail-safety
• reliable operability for years
• even in the event of a fault, the flawless operability of the device control (of the single-board computer) must be always guaranteed

In order to guarantee fail-safety, we developed a concept for a custom SBC in which two main processors are interconnected in such a way that one unit takes over if the other communicates indications of a failure or this threatens. In this case, we used two ARM Cortex A9 processors for the solution to be developed. The monitoring runs via an FPGA chip, as this is easily programmable.

As software, SECO relies on Linux Yocto in conjunction with the specially developed Boot loader "FNGBoot".

Thanks to the modular approach, we were able to quickly set up a corresponding supply chain for the product solution. It also enables us to track components down to the smallest component. This allows us to quickly provide compatible alternatives, even for discontinued assemblies.

The customer is again relying on SECO for the new product series of the fire alarm control panel and will be supplied with a new version of the SBC series.