Maintenance, Often Overlooked Embedded systems are usually difficult products to maintain. Once a product is shipped, the expertise within the company often drops quickly. The designers are assigned to new projects or leave the company. Eventually, maintenance is required and few remain who understand the design. When using the embedded PC, the hardware design is already well understood and the learning curve to get someone up to speed is reduced.
Documentation is a real problem in the embedded systems community.
Many attempts have been made to address the problem. The common approach to documentation is to ignore the problem and hope it's never needed. When the PC is used, much of the hardware and lower level software is well documented. All that has to be documented is the higher level portions of the software. The embedded PC can significantly reduce time to develop on projects where the application is able to take advantage of what the PC has to offer.