Project Files
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Scientific & Medical Projects
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A
local school for the handicapped wanted to expand their
training and rehabilitation program to water sports. They
had adapted an existing joystick controller to work with
two electric propellers, but wanted to add a half-speed
control and a remote joystick so that an on-board trainer
could take control in an emergency.
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The
M.I.T. Daedalus Project was building a human powered aircraft
to duplicate the flight of Daedalus from the island of Crete
to mainland Greece, a distance of sixty-nine miles. They
had started the design of an automated flight computer (autopilot)
to help free the pilot from the moment-to-moment control
of the aircraft but did not have the technical resources
to complete the project on time. The autopilot system consisted
of pitch and roll sensors, an airspeed sensor, a heading
sensor, a fluxgate compass, an altimeter, an analog computer
and a display computer.
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The
Blindsight Display Reader reads electronic appliance numeric
displays to the Blind. With the Display Reader, the Blind
can now use and control off-the-shelf microwave ovens, appliances,
vending machines, and VCRs.
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The
Precision Detectors PD2000 family of molecular characterization
detectors measures absolute values of molecular weights,
sizes, and shapes. Typical applications are polymers, proteins,
antibodies, polysacchrides and other macromolecules used
in the plastics, biotechnology, pharmaceutical and food
industries. The PD2000 series is available in single angle,
dual angle and high temperature versions with or without
dynamic light scattering (DLS) capabilities. The high performance
cell design provides exceptionally accurate measurements
for a broad range of molecules from less than 1000 daltons
up to 106 daltons for most samples, and to 107 daltons for
certain proteins and polymers.
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Bolton Engineering, Inc. was contracted by a local instrumentation company to construct a low-cost Audio MicroOhm Meter to be used in detecting circuit board short-circuits. Based completely on inexpensive low-power “jelly bean” CMOS ICs, this design ran for days and days off of a single 9V battery. The total material cost was well under $5.
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A
client had been manufacturing various versions of this instrument
for over 20 years. The design in production had been designed
several years before, but still incorporated manual wiring,
with critical components soldered directly to switches to
minimize parasitic electrical leakage. The client produced
two similar instruments, but the electronics for each was
unique.
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An
anesthesiologist had a concept for a digital instrument
that would monitor lung operation during surgery by modelling
the lungs as an RC (resistor, capacitor--also called "compliance")
network. Researchers had previously built analog computers
that could extract the network parameters but they had proved
too unreliable and inflexible for operating room use. A
microprocessor-based instrument would be significantly more
reliable and would add considerable functionality.
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Cognitech had spent several years researching and developing the Brainware 200, a personal relaxation device that uses a combination of pulsating lights and binaural sound to relieve stress and bring its users to a more serene state. Precisely coordinated, slowly evolving light and sound patterns gently coax users' Alpha waves to relax.
Cognitech had worked with a design firm for most of the development, but became unsatisfied as problems remained unsolved, and costs rose. Bolton Engineering, Inc. was hired to take over the project, fix these problems, and reduce cost where possible.
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Telepharmacy
Solutions, Inc. is a leading provider of e-commerce
solutions to the outpatient care market. TSI’s products
allow medication to be legally remotely dispensed to patients.
Other TSI products provide medication access control at
hospitals.
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The TCP/IP engine dumps large amounts
of data from experimental instruments into a PC over 100
Base-T Ethernet. The TCP/IP engine creates a virtual pipe
from an instrument into a PC, using a simple 16-bit
interface with simple hand-shaking. All aspects of the
TCP/IP application are hidden from the user, and the only
setup that is required is to set the device Ethernet address
and the target IP address.
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Designed a flexible, general-purpose
Laser Diode Driver that could work with a wide variety of
Laser Diodes.
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Developed a miniature Dual DSP Board
that used two capacitance-based fingerprint identification
chips to take a rapid succession of images to detect speed
of movement.
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Palomar Medical Technologies was developing a handheld
cosmetic laser surgical device and wanted to provide a real
time enhanced image of the patient’s internal vein
structure. The system had to fit into an existing handpiece.
The enhancement imaging software required significant
processing power.
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Designed a PC-Compatible camera for
the space-constrained handpiece of a cosmetic surgery laser.
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An Instrumentation Laboratory
product incorporated a sole-sourced component that had
become obsolete. Purchasing had located sufficient parts to
last for the product lifetime, but an unexpected contract
manufacturer shortage suddenly left them searching for
parts. The production line would be halted if a fix could
not be implemented quickly. Instrumentation Laboratory hired
Bolton Engineering to develop a small plug-in circuit board
to take the place of the obsoleted component.
In less than two weeks, Bolton Engineering delivered fully
functional boards that plugged into the original chip
location, duplicated the chip functionality, and
successfully passed all tests.
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A client was developing a new
generation of Blood Analysis instrumentation. The equipment
was based on an embedded PC running Linux, and incorporated
a variety of different subsystems, not all of which had been
completely specified. The project was at an early phase, and
the client was still unsure how the Touch Panel would
interface to the embedded computer. Bolton Engineering
designed a flexible controller board that could be stuffed
to work with either an RS-232 or USB interface.
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Consumer and Computer
