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ALL PROJECTS CONSUMER & COMPUTER INDUSTRIAL & COMMERCIAL SCIENTIFIC & MEDICAL ROBOTICS & MOTION CONTROL DIGITAL SIGNAL PROCESSING
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PHANTOM® Omni™ Force Feedback Joystick Acquisition Engine for Hand-held X-Ray Ambient Dashboard BigDog Quadruped Robot Control Board Sports Medicine Testing and Rehabilitation Systems Prototype Bicycle Power Meter Display Reader for the Blind Faxview: A Pocket-Sized Fax Machine RF Power Amplifier Predistortion Engine RedXDefense iModule Miniature USB Camera Brushless DC Motor Driver Retrofit 128 Line High Reliability Hot Swap Phone Switch Lottery Ticket Vending Machines Molecular Characterization Detector Tera Ohm Meter Low-Cost Audio Micro Ohm Meter Bi-Pedal Research Robot Laser Diode Driver DVI Video Development Board LittleDog Robot Military Standard 1275D Power Supply PCI Motion Control Interface PCI 4DI Imaging System Medical Cosmetic Laser Image Processor Fingerprint ID System Production Test System for Zeo Personal Sleep Coach Black-I Landshark Ground Vehicle Robot Blackfin Stamplet Board and TCP/IP Engine Board Tester Canoe Controller for the Handicapped Combination CO-Smoke Detector Force-Feedback Joystick Controller Daedalus Human-Powered Aircraft Wastewater Sludge Detector Touch Panel and Display Interface Thermal Imaging Camera Synthesized Sine Wave Generator Steganographic Audio Processor Quadrature Encoder Phased Array Microphone Pharmaceutical Vending Machine Personal Relaxation Device Lung Impedance Analyzer Laser Hair Removal Speed Sensor
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PDF Touch Panel and Display Interface

System Overview

Bolton Engineering was hired to design a Touch Panel controller to mount on the back of the system LCD. The board also consolidated the LCD and backlight control signals. To maintain the thinnest possible assembled board thickness, all the components were mounted on one circuit board side. In addition to the Touch Panel control logic, the board also incorporated an LVDS (Low Voltage Differential Signaling) serializer that consolidated the twenty-two wire LCD interface onto three LVDS pairs. Using LVDS not only simplified the wiring to the processor board, it also greatly reduced EMI because of the much smaller LVDS signal transitions and the differential nature of the signaling.

To provide the greatest possible system flexibility, both RS-232 and USB interfaces were incorporated. The board ran off a single 3.3V supply.

Project Scope

Bolton Engineering wrote the specification, designed the schematics, obtained vendor quotes, designed the 4-layer circuit board, tested the system under Linux, and delivered over fifty working prototypes.  

Touch Panel and Display Interface

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 specified. The client was unsure of whether the Touch Panel should interface to the host via USB or via RS-232, and wanted to implement both interfaces to maintain as much flexibility as possible.