Just a quick post for today: the question being one which has been doing the rounds among the more technically inclined when discussing Melbourne’s partially commissioned Myki ticketing system – ‘what version of Windows is it running on top of?’
Thankfully for us who are always looking for answers, this IP address conflict dialog displayed on a Fare Payment Device (aka Myki ‘reader’) spells it out clearly – Windows CE.
The same OS is used on the Tram Driver Consoles located inside each tram cab, as shown by this bog standard Windows CE login screen.
So what version of Windows CE is in use? On another occasion I found a Tram Driver Console with the Windows Taskbar displayed, which gives us a few clues.
For comparison, this is the Windows CE 5.0 desktop:
And the same screen for Windows Embedded CE 6.0:
Released back in 2006, the advantages of Windows CE 6.0 over the older version 5.0 are:
- 2 GB of virtual memory for each process, up from only 32 MB.
- Limit of more than 32,000 processes, up from just 32.
As for the hardware in use in Melbourne, ACS Solutions supplied EVD 100 validators are the Myki scanners installed at railway stations, with the EVD 200 onboard trams and buses. Both have a 800 MHz processor, 128 MB of RAM, 1 GB of flash memory, and run the Windows CE operating system.
I have no idea knows how much memory the cobbled together Myki codebase actually needs, but at least for the readers and tram driver consoles, we know that Windows Embedded CE 6.0 what everything is running atop.
Further reading
- Specification sheet for the EVD 100 stationary validator, as used at Melbourne railway stations
Bonus material
In November 2012 I found this error message on a Myki FPD stuck in a reboot loop – an exception thrown by the open source ‘log4net’ library for the Microsoft .NET runtime.
[…] system is that it is faster than a magnetic strip based one: Myki fails at that. Maybe building the entire system atop Windows CE is the issue, perhaps it is because we hired a company that was described in a leaked draft of an […]
It is worth noting that ACS Atlas ticketing system is also built on the windows CE operating system 2 years in and we have very few issues with out ACS supplied system in Adelaide.
Adelaide signed their contract back in early 2010, it was quite a quick turnaround:
http://www.zdnet.com/sa-awards-30m-e-ticketing-contract-1339300918/
I’m guessing the reason for the smooth rollout is that ACS Atlas is an off-the-shelf ticketing system:
http://www.acs-inc.com/public-transport/central-mgmt-systems/br-altas-public-transport-ticketing-system.pdf
I’m pretty certain that the issues in Melbourne aren’t with the hardware or Windows CE operating system on top of it, but the custom software developed for the Myki system.
[…] The story starts on my tram home from work, when I noticed the Tram Driver Console in the rear cab was stuck in a reboot loop. The first screen was a simple ‘Launching application’ message on the standard Windows CE desktop. […]
[…] As were Windows error messages. […]