Reach Technology, a touch screen device company, was officially named 44th fastest growing company by Silicon Valley Business Journal.

Prospect Question: My biggest concern is longevity. My products need to remain viable for a good 10 years (nature of our market). Having designed in displays before I know that about the time I release to production the display is at end of life...I was hoping that the industry had changed a bit...I am concerned that it is difficult to guarantee the longevity I require...that is where my discomfort lies...My other choice is to use more standard buttons and a much less sophisticated these tend to hang around longer. That being said.. is there a display size that tends to remain active the longest? Reach Technology Answer: Your longevity concerns are shared by many of our customers. They make products for the medical industry, and changes are painful for them because of the regulatory issues. They require that products do not change over time, or change as little as [...]

Full Transcript We have a range of LCD sizes we support. The smallest is the 4.3-inch. People sometimes ask for the smaller size, the 3.5", which is the old Palm Pilot size. The reason we've never done a 3.5-inch screen or module is that once you get to that size, the smaller sizes, the LCDs change because it's a consumer-based product or a phone-based product. The LCDs themselves change so quickly that we can't find a panel and a supplier that can guarantee a long-term supply at a reasonable price. Yes, you can get them from some vendors, but it's not an attractive enough price. For us, the smallest size we do is 4.3-inch. Then, from 4.3", we go up to 5.7", 7", 8.4", 10". You can even drive a 12-inch screen.

Customers find within a week; they can have something up and running with a development kit. Full Transcript The way to get started with the Reach solution is quite simple. It's a development kit. We provide development kits that have everything you need to get started: the display, the controller, cables, mounted boards, power supply. Get one of these kits, and it comes with demo software, and it comes with the manual that explains how to do very simple stuff, to begin with. If you can start with that, just to get a handle on the whole concept of touch control, then if you have any issues moving forward, we have tech support on staff, people you can call in. We say, "If you spend more than 15 minutes scratching your head, give us a call because we can usually help." The development kits that we provide [...]

See display module features in action: on-board proportional fonts, fixed-width fonts, parameter macro, label macro, simple math macro, easy-to-use buttons, save/restore drawing state, dynamic labels, text in a box, relative touch, data visualization charts, slider controls (compass, gauge meters), animation, scroll and rotate, and drawing primitives (shapes). Note: No audio.

Full Transcript One of the interesting characteristics of the embedded interface system is, unlike PCs, we expect them to do the same thing each time. If I go to my microwave and I type in the number of minutes and then say start, and it does this thing each the same way each time that’s great. If I type start, or if I type some buttons and it stuttered, like how a PC does, I think it’s broken. The embedded world is different than the PC world that’s why Android is great for PC consumer-type applications where we expect sometimes there’s a lag between pushing a button and seeing a result. Sometimes there’s a delay and the delay may change; that’s we expect with PCs, and maybe with tablets, and maybe with our phones, but with a piece of equipment like a medical device that’s dermatological skin laser, no, [...]

See the parts you get and how they go together to power the display module and run the demos.

See how to how to set up hardware and software to get up-and-running once your touchscreen module development kit arrives.

Full Transcript 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 consistency so that [...]

Full Transcript We make things onshore. Unlike a lot of other companies, we never went offshore. We’ve always manufactured in the United States, in California actually, which is surprising for a lot of people. They think of California as a high-cost place to do business, but because California has a lot of people in the manufacturing in the high-tech business, there’s a lot of competition so we can get pretty good prices to assemble in the United States. The big advantage of having our products made in the United States is control, the ability to have appropriate lead times and to have good quality. The problem with sending stuff offshore, yes you can make it cheaper, but if I go offshore and make a thousand boards or thousand modules, and they come back, and I have customers waiting for them, and I’ve scheduled everything they come back and [...]