Product category:
Design Services
News Release from: Custom Design Technologies | Subject: Design and production
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 31 August 2006
Design and production come together in
control
The multiple design and production skills of Custom Design Technologies have combined to produce handheld controllers for Electrox's Cobra series laser marking systems.
The multiple design and production skills of Custom Design Technologies have combined to produce handheld controllers for Electrox's Cobra series laser marking systems Electrox is the only UK designer and manufacturer of engraving lasers used for marking a wide variety of different products
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 20 Oct 2004 at 8.00am (UK)
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When Electrox introduced its new generation Cobra laser marking system, several items were carried over from the previous product line, particularly the control pendant.
This was beginning to look its age so the company decided to update it, originally anticipating doing the design and manufacture in house.
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However, at that stage the design team were attracted by the idea of using a membrane keypad on the control pendant and contacted Custom Keypads, a division of cDT.
John Blenkinsopp, Senior Development Engineer at Electrox, commented: "On discussing our requirements with cDT's design team, we realised there was an opportunity to take advantage of their expertise and outsource much of the work for this element of the project".
"We had already sourced a suitable enclosure so CDT designed a keypad to fit this, machining the box to provide a finished product", he continued.
At this stage cDT also became involved in producing the electronics to fit inside the enclosure.
Electrox's electronics design team sent over schematics of the circuit for cDT to produce a new PCB tailored to fit the new enclosure, a process that required shrinking the circuit board to a quarter of its original size.
Finally, cDT tied up the remaining aesthetic matters such as mounting a liquid crystal display (LCD), machining and mounting a plastic window in the enclosure and mounting the finished assembly to deliver a fully tested and working control pendant to Electrox.
Blenkinsopp concluded: "cDT produced prototypes of the various components and progressed to making up preprototype units for evaluation by our engineers, marketing department and end users".
"These were well received and the quality of finished production units has been equally impressive".
Ian Watson, cDT's Marketing Director, added: "This project is an excellent illustration of our ability to deliver flexible integrated solutions for low volume production runs".
"Our ability to design and manufacture a sealed membrane keypad to fit into the customer's choice of enclosure as well as machining the enclosure and producing and integrating a PCB to deliver fully assembled and tested control pendants enabled Electrox to concentrate on its core strengths of designing and manufacturing high quality laser marking systems".
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