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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 Laser Hair Removal Speed Sensor

System Overview

Bolton Engineering Inc constructed the Speed Sensor around an Analog Devices Dual Blackfin Processor, a mobile SDRAM, and serial Flash memory. The Fingerprint ID images were captured at 40MSPS over the Blackfin's Programmable Parallel Interfaces (PPIs). The Blackfin's internal timers were configured to provide synchronized timing signals for the Fingerprint Sensors. In addition to the Fingerprint Sensor interfaces, a miniature 20pin board-stacking connector was included to allow a future analog data acquisition board to be incorporated into the system. Bolton Engineering subsequently designed the acquisition board, plus a miniature power supply board.

Project Scope

Bolton Engineering wrote the specification, designed the schematics, obtained vendor quotes, designed the 8-layer circuit board, wrote diagnostic and driver software in 'C', debugged the system, and delivered over seventy working prototypes.  

Laser Hair Removal Speed Sensor

Palomar Medical Technologies was developing a handheld mass-market laser hair removal system and required a reliable way to control laser exposure time as the device moved over a user's skin. Various speed-sensing technologies were tested and rejected. The most promising technique used two capacitance-based fingerprint identification chips to take a rapid succession of images that were processed by a Digital Signal Processor (DSP) to detect speed of movement.
The system had to fit in a tight handpiece together with the Fingerprint ID Sensors and optics. The Fingerprint ID sensors were mounted on flexible circuit boards to ensure good signal integrity and minimize the packaged size. All handpiece electronics had to be squeezed on a single 1.2" x 1.6" board. The power supply subsystem was initially mounted separately, in a base station, but was later incorporated into the handpiece. The system had to take minimal power, as there was no airflow and no space for adding a fan. The correlation-based speed detection software required significant processing capability.