Working with Winmate – Past, present and future

Founded in 1996, Winmate Communication Inc has since become a leading industrial LCD display and panel PC solutions provider in the industrial and embedded marketplace.  In 2005, after substantial market research in to the growing all-in-one packaged LCD market, Impulse put pen to paper and signed a distribution agreement to supply their comprehensive product range in the UK.  Now, as a Premium Partner of Winmate, Impulse is one of the top 10 worldwide distributors for Winmate products.

What makes Winmate so special?

The first thing that we noticed about Winmate was their vast yet innovative product range, catering for many different industrial applications including automation, kiosks, retail and digital signage. The diversity of their display products, such as multiple size and touch screen options, ensures that Winmate products are one of the first to be recommended to Impulse customers.

The quality of products and the technical back-up services from Winmate are second to none. The build quality and long-term supply roadmaps of their displays is exceptional which is of vital importance in the industrial market. These crucial factors played a big part in the decision to make Winmate an Impulse Premium Partner in 2007.

Winmate facilities

In 2011 the Impulse senior management took a trip to Taiwan and visited the Winmate facilities. They enjoyed a tour of the factory which acted as a unique and valuable insight into their investment in the quality and build processes of the production line for the Winmate products.

“My first impression of the Winmate facilities was that it appeared very organised and streamlined. Their state of the art production line included SMT and DIP lines, and excellent pre- and post-build testing facilities. Their EMC and environmental test chambers ensure product reliability, and along with their clean rooms to minimise particle interference between the glass and touch screen, Winmate are clearly industry leaders and at the cutting edge of LCD touch screen technology and production.”

Craig Stone
General Manager

Impulse and Winmate – working together for the future

It is clear that Winmate, like Impulse, is constantly looking to develop their product mix and to move forward in the industrial display and panel PC market. Their increasing support within the new, yet growing mobile computing sector ensures to cement their status as a key partner with Impulse.

From all at Impulse, we look forward to continuing to develop our relationship with Winmate in all aspects of the Industrial Computing market in the UK for many years to come.

Touch Screen Technology

Does your application require a touch screen display? Unsure what type of touch screen technology to use? Impulse has created a series of resources to help explain the pros, cons and application use for each of the common touch screen technologies.

An overview of touch screen technology

View our touch screen comparison table

There are five mainstream technologies of touch screen utilised in our industrial LCD displays and Panel PCs. The most common and widely used is Resistive followed by Capacitive, Surface Acoustic Wave, Infrared and the latest Projected Capacitive (PCT).

Each type of touch screen technology has its own distinctive characteristics, some providing advantages and some limitations.

Please see below for a summary of the five key types of touch screen technology available from Impulse. Click the heading of each section to view more detailed explanations of the touch screen technology.

Resistive touch screens

Resistive touch screens offer the lowest cost type of touch screen on the market. Resistive touch screens can accept an input from almost any object, be it a bare finger, a gloved hand or even a pen.

Being so versatile, resistive based touch screens also have some disadvantages. Due to the way resistive touch screens are constructed, they are easier to scratch compared with their glass based counterparts. In addition, resistive touch screens are also affected by extreme temperatures although the latest 8-wire resistive options eliminate this problem.

Learn more about Resistive touch screens

Capacitive touch screens

Capacitive touch screens are commonly found on modern day smart phones and tablet computers. Capacitive touch screens are commonly constructed from glass and are much more resistant against scratches, abrasion and extreme temperatures. Again, capacitive touch screens have their own limitations too. Due to the way the touch sensors work, capacitive touch screens only detect touch from an organic input, such as a bare finger.

Learn more about Capacitive touch screens

SAW touch screens

Surface acoustic wave (SAW) technology uses ultrasonic waves that pass over the touch screen panel. When the panel is touched, a portion of the wave is absorbed. This change in the ultrasonic waves registers the position of the touch event and sends this information to the controller for processing.

Learn more about Surface Acoustic Wave touch screens

Infrared touch screens

An infrared touch screen uses an array of X-Y infrared LED and photodetector pairs around the edges of the screen to detect a disruption in the pattern of LED beams.

The LED beams cross each other in vertical and horizontal patterns. When a user touches the screen, the sensors detect an interruption in the X-Y infrared pulses enabling the controller to calculate the touch location.

Learn more about Infrared touch screens

Projected Capacitive touch screens

Traditional touch screen interfaces, such as resistive, capacitive and surface acoustic wave are surface activated. Surface activated means the user’s input needs to make physical contact with the touch interface for it to work.

Projected capacitive (PCT) touch screens do not require physical contact to operate. PCT touch screens are made up of a thin film, covered in a grid of micro-fine sensing wires.
A low voltage current is applied to the sensing wires, creating a uniform electro static field.

Learn more about Projected Capacitive touch screens 

Post Embedded World 2012 roundup

Embedded World Exhibition and Conference 2012 is the world’s largest international trade fair and congress event for all things embedded. From February 28th to March 1st 2012, Embedded World featured around 900 international companies, including many of Impulse’s partners, showcasing their latest products and services.

Embedded World 2012 lived up to its expectations with a wide variety of cutting edge embedded technology on show. Having visited Embedded World numerous times in the past, it certainly felt like there was an increase in visitor numbers for 2012, with many of our partners also commenting on an upsurge in visitors to their stands this year.

The Impulse team utilised some serious shoe leather in their pursuit of the latest embedded computing technology and the increased number of exhibitors and seminars certainly made for a busy few days.

Our partners showcased many of their new products and technologies, with many of them focusing on Cedar Trail based products and also a selection of very interesting rugged mobile computing products. Importantly, our team gained considerable first hand knowledge on the new products from the wide variety of technical experts that were on hand during the event.

Our marketing and technical teams are now hard at work to launch these products to the UK industrial computing market and we look forward to highlighting these in our forthcoming newsletters, blogs and press releases. You can also expect to see these products on our brand new Impulse website, which was launched just before Embedded World 2012.

For Impulse, Embedded World is not just about evaluating new products; Our management team spent time with each of our partners to help discuss our joint plans for 2012 and beyond. These talks are invaluable and further build on strong partner relationships we have built over the last 19 years of business and also allow us to provide valuable feedback to our partners from our customers.

It’s always difficult to choose one highlight from all those we experienced during the show, but the strong showing from our partners such as Advantech, AAEON, DFI, DIGI, ICOP and Winmate is always good to see. Not only were their stands chocked full of the latest products and technologies but there was a clear focus and direction on how these products fit to specific industry verticals and markets, something we are great advocates of here at Impulse.

Finally, it was interesting to see the further adoption of Intelligent Systems and the Internet of Things, with both Microsoft and Intel showcasing a number of concepts and products based on these topics. It was also good to see Impulse featured on the Microsoft stand on their Windows Embedded Silver Partner display.