Medical Equipment

Reach was asked by a manufacturer of medical equipment to solve a problem they were having with the LCD flat panel display used in their unit. The unit held a standard PC motherboard with a special graphics card capable of driving the LCD directly. The problem was that the cabling system for the LCD was bulky and used an interconnect board that was prone to intermittent failures and disconnections. The manufacturer of the graphics card they were using supplied the cable assembly and were not providing the support the manufacturer needed.

Reach’s solution was to redesign the graphics adapter card to use a new lightweight cable that plugged directly into the LCD panel. The light weight meant that a mechanical shock or jar to the display would not loosen the cable. The new solution cost the same as the old one, plus the relationship between Reach and the manufacturer allowed them to have tighter control on product availablity, order status, and shipments.

 

Automobile Service Equipment

A manufacurer of wheel aligment systems asked Reach to help with a requirement for a new model they were designing. Their customer wanted to use a remote display at each wheel to aid the alignment process. The remote screen was to be an LCD panel and it needed to be touch enabled. Reach proposed that they use a mass-market display adapter card using the new DVI digital standard that can extend to 10 meters (33 feet) and that Reach design and build a DVI-to-LCD receiver card with a touch controller for them. This product not only met their needs, but because of the touch controller integration, the Reach board was less expensive than any off-the-shelf solution.

 

Automated ticket vendor

A company with experience in automated ticket machines for parking lots wanted to bid on a contract for a large rapid transit system. Althought they had experience in electronics design and manufacturing, this new system would exceed their design capabilities. Initially they contracted with an outside design house to develop the new components, but were soon overwhelmed with the complexity of managing the design house and buying parts for the assembly companies who would build the units. At this stage they asked Reach to take over the whole design and manufacturing process so they could concentrate on what they did best – design the overall unit and interface with the demanding government customer. Reach finished the designs, solved integration problems, and manufactured both the board assemblies and cables. Reach also developed test fixtures so that each assembly, whether for a new machine or for use as a repair spare, was fully tested before being installed.

 

Network Testing

Cisco Systems has a problem with their new "universal" serial interface for their router units. The universal interface supported multiple standars such as RS232, RS449, V.35, and so forth. How it worked was that when the appropriate cable was plugged into the connector, the interface was set according to the cable type. This was a great boon to users who got flexibility while maintaining ease of use. However it made testing difficult given that an interface had to be tested in all possible modes. In addition to that, the interface could be either a DCE (like a modem) or a DTE (like a computer) so the number of different cables needed to fully test the interface was overwhelming.

Reach Technology was asked to develop a cable emulator to help automate the test of these universal serial ports. The problem was that Cisco didn’t know how many emulators they needed in a single box, nor whether they wanted a switching component so that a single reference port could test multiple UUT (Unit Under Test) ports.

Reach’s solution was to design and build the Modular Serial Switch (MSS) system. It consists of a VME chassis, a PC compatible controller and plug-in switch cards that can be configured in a variety of ways to implement either 1-1 or 1-N serial cable emulators. The switch cards are connected together using ribbon cables not the VME backplane for complete flexibility. The system has been a great success and was adapted easily to new serial interface standards.