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 [...]

Full Transcript One of the hard things is to figure out which LCD to use. There are such a plethora of LCDs. As products are made, you can see consumer products these days coming in all sorts of sizes; there is the 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 [...]

Full Transcript One of the great things that Reach does is we provide a consistent interface between small screens and big screens. If you are developing a product that initially you think you want a small screen of a 4.3-inch screen, which is our smallest, and later you decide you will need something bigger, you can use a different module with a different screen size and the interface is the same. You have to scale your graphics obviously for the different resolutions of the screens, but you don’t have to have a completely new system. It gives you screen change flexibility when you’re doing the design. You’re not locked into something. You can start with one size and move to another, either start big and then move small or vice versa. screen change, change screen sizes, change screen, change size, change screen size [...]

Full Transcript One of the interesting characteristics of an embedded 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. But 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 of 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 [...]

Full Transcript The reason you would like to use Reach for your embedded color touch surface is that we provide full lifetime support for you. We give you design support at the beginning, we provide excellent execution when you're buying embedded color touch surface 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 [...]

Full Transcript First of all, one of the great things about Reach is, we have, I think, phenomenal touchscreen technical support, 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. [...]

Full Transcript The great thing about our embedded touchscreen 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 embedded touchscreen 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, [...]

The new product line offers off-the-shelf color touch display modules with proven hard­ware and full software support to speed development and reduce production risk. G2 (Generation Two) modules give products a high-end look with animated controls and glossy indicators. […]

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