Consumer Electronics

Thomas Instrumentation has provided control systems for office electronics for many years, and we have recently expanded ourselves to the smart home appliance market. When it comes to home and office electronics, it is important to design systems for ease of use, safety, and low cost. Some of our product designs include:

This is a 1-3/4-Quart electric kettle which quickly boils water or heats it to a specific temperature. It has an LED display for temperature, a keep-warm mode, low level water notification, and an automatic shut-off for safety. Thomas Instrumentation designed both the electronics and software for this product. For this system, we’re accurately controlling a heating element, precisely measuring temperature, monitoring water levels, alarming if the water gets too low, showing information on an LED display, and automatically shutting off the heater for safety. We also manufactured the first 7,000 controllers before the customer moved production to China.

For this product, we designed a small, cost-effective power and motor control board for the sharpener. They wanted to use a smaller and less expensive power supply for their units, so our board had to compensate for it. As before, we manufactured the first several thousand boards before they moved production to China.

This section refers to different versions of essentially the same system. The product uses information read from magnetic cards to determine whether or not a user has permission to access or utilize the device on which the system is installed. Typically this product is installed on devices such as copy machines, fax machines, vending machines, laundry machines, etc. that are managed by a single office, company, or college. The magnetic cards can for example be used to allow all employees access to vending and copy machines, but only allow management level employees access to the fax machine. This card system can also be used in a credit or debit fashion to replace change-based machines.