Corporate Systems Engineering (CSE) manufactures a variety of residential and commercial switches for the Electric Utility industry. The switches are installed at a residence or business at the point where power enters the site from the power grid. The switches respond to commands sent from the utility company to regulate the amount of electricity consumed by that site. Different switches use different communication paths to link with the utility company, including VHF, Cellular and RF.

Installation and inspection of the switches are done on site by utility company personnel. To facilitate their efforts, each person is provided a handheld PDA to use for configuring, testing and diagnosing the switches. CSE chose originally to go with the Palm Pilot as their PDA. For each company that purchased their switches, CSE would create software for the Palm that communicated with the switch and provided feedback in whatever form or format requested by the utility company. As time went on it became increasingly difficult for the utility companies to purchase the number Palm Pilots needed by their personnel. The companies requested CSE adopt a new PDA platform.

CSE elected to go with a Windows Mobile platform for their new PDAs. Pioneer Software’s senior software engineer Jim Shaffer was contracted to create Windows Mobile versions based on the original Palm Pilot versions. In consultation with Jim, CSE elected to use CE.NET developed in VS2005 using VB.NET. Pioneer Software ported software for three switches from the Palm to Windows Mobile. Pioneer Software also contracted to create software for a newly developed fourth switch. Although the switch commands and switch data are essentially the same for all switch types, the communication protocol and packet structure varied for each switch. CSE provided interface components for the PDA that attached to the PDA’s serial input and translated the VHF, Cellular or RF signal into serial data allowing the software to use standard serial communications.

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