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Reach offices will be closed Friday, March 29th.

See a new tutorial from Reach Technical Support. 8:24 minutes

See how to how to get up-and-running once your embedded touchscreen LCD module development kit arrives.

See a new tutorial from Reach Technical Support. 8:24 minutes

BMPload is used to download bitmaps, macros, and fonts to the SLCD. This video shows how to use many of the commonly-used features of BMPload.

Download support files (BMPload_5.zip)

See a new tutorial from Reach Technical Support. 4:36 minutes

Simple output formatting helps when updating text fields by limiting the number of characters drawn and automatically providing leading or trailing spaces. This video demonstrates the basics of using simple output formatting with string variables.

Download support files (TextFields.zip)

See a new tutorial from Reach Technical Support. 10:03 minutes

BMPload is used to download bitmaps, macros, and fonts to the SLCD. This video shows how to use many of the commonly-used features of BMPload.

Download support files (BMPload_4_3.zip)

See a new interview with Jonathan More, President and co-founder. 1:03 minutes

“We don’t force version change on people. If you get one of our development systems with version say 1.5 software on it and you use it to develop your embedded application, run it through all the tests, everything works fine, it’s reliable, then from then on you can buy from us a module with that version of software forever. We don’t say, “Oh, we don’t support that anymore. Now, you have to move to this.” No, that doesn’t make any sense.

We have hundreds, we have probably 300 or 400 customers and a lot of them have unique versions and we ship them the unique version. They call up, they say, “I want to order what I ordered last time,” sometimes they don’t even know what their version is, we know. We provide the same version over and over again so that there’s a consistency, so that what was tested, what was proven to work is what they ship … is what they put into their equipment.”

See a new interview with Jonathan More, President and co-founder. 1:42 minutes

“The great thing about our solution is that it is simple. You can look at other people’s development systems. For example, if you want to do Android, have spinners, animated this and that, it’s all very pretty but it is very complicated. It will take quite a bit to learn and is in fact is not something an embedded engineer really has a good grasp on because it’s more web-oriented tools.

Our system is very easy to use. The great thing about it is, when you’re developing a system, an embedded piece of equipment, you want to take an incremental approach. You really want to start off by making something very simple and work from end-to-end. I have a screen with a button on it. I push the button, my embedded device does something.

The embedded device has an input, a sensor change, I see the change in my screen. Having that, even though it sounds very simple, having that line work reliably, where you understand all the components along and then can build up from there, is the right way to do development.

Premature optimization has killed many an embedded product. Making a gorgeous front-end, but then doesn’t actually work to the end, or isn’t reliable or changes over time or acts like a computer, sometimes it’s fast, sometimes it’s slow, that’s not good. You want to start with something you know and then build up. That’s what our environment and our system allows you to do.”

See a new interview with Jonathan More, President and co-founder. 1:21 minutes

“One of the hard things is to figure out which LCD to use. There is such a plethora of LCDs. As products are made, you can see consumer products these days coming all sorts of sizes; there is 4.3-inch screen. In fact the color touch phones seemed to get bigger and then they get smaller. I don’t think they’re any smaller, they just keep getting bigger, but there are a lot of choices.

If you’re not familiar with the industry, if you’re not familiar with the options, you can go down the wrong path. Many displays are consumer-oriented. As we know consumer life cycles or product cycles are getting faster and faster. They’re nine months these days, which means if you pick a panel that’s in a consumer cycle, in nine months it will be gone and there’ll be a new one.

Now that’s great if you’re developing cell phones and you want the latest and greatest technology, but if you’re developing a product that you want to build and sell to customers for five, seven years, an industrial product, then having your LCD go out of, end of life is terrible.”

See a new interview with Jonathan More, President and co-founder. 1:16 minutes

“First of all, one of the great things about Reach is, we have, I think, phenomenal tech support, phenomenal support that no other company has. When you call our technical support line, an engineer answers. Not only an engineer, but the engineer who is familiar, intimately familiar with every aspect of the product. The code, they write the code, they check out LCDs, they do testing.

You’re talking to somebody who really knows what they’re talking about. That rarely happens with any other product that a business can buy. That ability, to get your question answered quickly is huge. We say, “If you’re frustrated, you’re working on our gear and you spend more than 15 minutes scratching your head, call us.”

In five minutes, we can save you an hour. It’s no big deal. Call us, “What are you doing? Oh, you’re trying to do this. Here, let me send you … let me point you to an application, let me just give you some word of advice, tell you what somebody else did, give you a best practice advice.” Things move much faster.”

See a new interview with Jonathan More, President and co-founder. 1:38 minutes

“The reason you would like to use Reach for your embedded color touch surface is because we provide a full lifetime support for you.

We give you design support at the beginning, we provide excellent execution when you’re buying the products in terms of delivering when we say we’re going to deliver, giving you reasonable lead times, stocking products, stocking LCDs. Actually, that’s a big deal because LCDs can have 14-week lead times. It’s not a standard product that electrical engineers are used to where microcontrollers are parts you can get off the shelf. LCDs tend to have a long lead time.

The back end, if something goes obsolete, we handle that as well. We’ll give, with almost every product we have, if something goes obsolete, we will come up with a form fit and function drop in replacement to keep you going. The last thing you need to do is to worry about end of life issues.

We specialize in long term availability, five to seven years is sort of a minimum. We have people who use the same product for ten years. Once it’s designed in, once it’s been approved, because all these products go through a long approval process. You have EMI testing, you have ESD testing, FCC approval in some cases. Once that’s approved, you don’t want it to change because you have to go through all those approvals again.

Reach supports our customers every step of the way.”