Case Studies: Optical Refractometer

"Making Technology Work"

Case Study - Optical Refractometer

A leading manufacturer of Refractometers was developing a new product range based on digital technology. They were faced with a major development requiring a diverse set of technical skills, from physics and optics, through electronics, software and mechanical design. In order to expedite the development they looked for a supplier to provide the basic design of the processor board / keypad and also the basic software drivers for this board. This allowed their design team to concentrate on those areas specific to the company's core skills.

A high performance processor was a must for the application as a considerable amount of high speed calculation is required to analyse the refractometer readings. Further, a variety of interfaces were required to read data from the refractometer, in particular a very high speed serial interface was required. For future requirements interfaces such as ethernet and USB were required.

Eventually the Motorola MPC850 PowerPc® processor was chosen for the application as it provides the high performance required combined with a very flexible I/O structure for interfacing to a variety of communications systems.

EGS Technologies worked closely with the customer's engineers to develop the MPC850 processor board with the relevant interfaces and to develop this board as part of a module comprising the board, display, front panel and keypad membrane. EGS now supply this complete sub assembly is manufactured into the new range of product.

EGS also developed a set of low level drivers which were then used by the customer's application programmers to provide the complete application.

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