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.

15 years at Impulse

Craig Wright - Operations Director

Back in 1993, at the time of its incorporation, Impulse was simply a specialist electronics distributor based in Cannock. In 1997, 4 years on, I joined as a Technical Sales Engineer where I quickly found my feet in the industrial computing industry. Since then I have been proud to be part of the success and development of the company, and now as Operations Director continue to help drive Impulse to new levels in the industry.

During the past 15 years, the directors of the company have developed Impulse’s core competences to move from simple distribution into a complete solutions provider and system integrator. As well as the manufacturing and automation, transportation and defence markets, We now service industries as unique and diverse as oil and gas, security and surveillance, medical and point of care markets, each one bringing its own challenges and opportunities.

With the help and dedication of the directors, and the experienced and ever expanding team here at Impulse, we continue to be a leading UK hardware and software partner for our customers in the design, development and deployment of their industrial and embedded projects and requirements.

I am confident we will continue to go from strength to strength through our continued investment in our core competences, including our technical and project management capabilities. We will endeavour to continue to be of great assistance to all of our customers for many years to come, many of whom have been with us since the Company’s inception in 1993.

New and improved flooring in System Integration facility at Impulse

Here at Impulse, we are constantly looking to improve our services and processes in all areas, whether it is in technical, logistics, sales or marketing. As part of this endeavour, we have just fitted our System Integration facility with brand new, state of the art ESD (Electrostatic Discharge) flooring.

Our Microsoft certified engineers work tirelessly on customised embedded systems, and are extremely disciplined in keeping the working environment as clean and static free as possible. Even so, static electricity built up from walking on ordinary carpets throughout the building can affect sensitive computer components, such as the processor (CPU), hard drive, memory and expansion cards. It is sometimes hard for the technicians to keep a completely static electricity free workshop, so the installation of the new ESD flooring does all the hard work for them.

By wiping out the threat of static electricity and the problems it can cause to installations, we are completely eradicating a variable which can potentially cause hardware failure or malfunction.

This is just one aspect of our System Integration facility that makes Impulse one of the leading System Integrators in the UK. For more information please see our System Integration facility page, or call one of our experienced technical sales team on +44(0)1782 337 800.

Sealevel and Impulse in the UK

Ben Jervis – Marketing Manager, Impulse Corporation Ltd

During a highly successful relationship that has spanned over 10 years, Impulse and Sealevel have continued to develop and strengthen our brands together in the UK market.

Back in 1999, Impulse first put pen to paper on a distribution agreement which allowed us to distribute Sealevel’s innovative board level and distributed I/O products and solutions to our customers here in the UK. This was a major milestone for Impulse, as it allowed us to develop in to a market that had previously been untapped due to lack of good product and service.

Since then, Impulse has become a leading name in Europe in the design, assembly and distribution of Industrial and Embedded Computing platforms and solutions, with an experienced System Integration team, fully qualified and Microsoft certified.

Now at the cutting edge of marketing in the Industrial Computing industry, Impulse is working closely with Sealevel to increase and promote the brand image of both companies in the UK. Here at Impulse we believe that joint marketing ventures between supplier and distributor can ultimately provide the most success. Getting product exposure and brand recognition is paramount in today’s market, and using the experience and knowledge of the product and industry that Sealevel can provide, undoubtedly proves invaluable.

We are looking forward to continuing to work closely with Sealevel in promoting their products and services. Their ethos and marketing methods compliment those of Impulse, and can only bolster an already successful relationship that we are confident will span many years to come.

AAEON Boxer PC range

It is not surprising that the Boxer PC range from AAEON has been a cornerstone of the Impulse product range since its launch in 2004. At the time, the designers of the Japanese bullet trains needed a rugged low powered, industrial computer, and thus AAEON was commissioned to develop the now industry leading Boxer PC. Since its inception over 8 years ago, AAEON’s Boxer PC range has been expanded to over 20 systems with a wide range of specifications, designed to accommodate most industrial applications.

View entire range

What makes Boxer PCs so rugged?
The first thing you will notice about the Boxer PC is its unique aluminium “fin” style chassis. This is reminiscent of the type of heatsink found on CPUs for decades, which creates a large surface area capable of dispersing heat generated by the components within the PC. Whereas traditional PCs require a fan to cool the internal components, the fan being prone to wear and failure, AAEON’s Boxer PC does away with this as the temperature is kept under control by the natural airflow over the highly thermally conductive chassis.

The advantage of having no moving parts in a PC is that the number of failures due to wear and tear is dramatically reduced, if not eradicated completely. When combined with Solid State Storage, a type of hard drive with no mechanical parts, the Boxer PC has no moving parts at all. This creates an extremely rugged system capable of withstanding knocks and vibrations that may normally cause fans or traditional hard drives to fail.


Why should I choose a Boxer PC for my application?
For many of our customers, longevity and availability is key to deciding which products to use in their industrial applications. For this reason, alongside the Boxer PC’s rugged reliability, AAEON also ensure that all components that make up the Boxer PCs have long term availability.

The components and processors used in AAEON’s Boxer PCs, such as Intel’s Atom N270, are on long-term roadmaps, meaning supply and availability can be sustained for up to 7 years.

The Boxer PC range also has design features ideal for industrial environments. Features such as a wide DC voltage input, wide operating temperature range and industry leading certifications ensure that AAEON’s Boxer PC range is ready and capable to support your industrial computer requirements.

How flexible are AAEON’s Boxer PCs’ I/O options?
With over 20 different system specifications available in AAEON’s Boxer PC range, the I/O options are extremely varied and flexible. Many systems include isolated ports, configurable serial ports and high performance LAN interfaces as standard, with options to expand systems with extra PCI, PCI Express and Mini PCI Express slots.

If there isn't a system that meets your exact I/O requirements, you can even specify your own I/O configuration on request.

In summary

• Fanless rugged design
• The aluminium “fin” design of the boxer’s chassis enables the system to run entirely fanless, increasing its reliability and gives it the ability to be a truly rugged system.
• Long term product availability
• AAEON’s Boxer PCs are designed with long life industrial components, allowing for sustained supply and availability for as long as seven years.
• Comprehensive I/O choices
• The Boxer PC range has a wide choice of I/O options including isolated ports, configurable serial ports, high performance LAN interfaces and expansion such as PCI, PCI Express and Mini PCI Express.
• Innovative industrial features
• The Boxer PC range has design features ideal for industrial environments such as a wide DC voltage input, wide operating temperature range and industry leading certifications.

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 

Do you know the ADAM family?

The ADAM-6050

Advantech is a global leader in data acquisition I/O module design and manufacturing, offering complete stand-alone data acquisition modules which are broadly used in industrial applications such as facility monitoring, industrial process control and environmental monitoring.

Advantech remote I/O modules are categorised into two families, Ethernet I/O (ADAM-6000 series) and RS-485 I/O (ADAM-4000 series), further subdivided into Analog I/O and Digital I/O modules some of which support the industry-leading Modbus communication protocol.

The ADAM Remote I/O module series has been a consistent and reliable figure in the industrial automation field for almost 20 years. Whether you are implementing large or small automation systems, Advantech’s ADAM Remote I/O modules offer the cornerstone for your e-automation requirements.

The ADAM-4000 Remote I/O series

ADAM-4000 modules are the perfect choice for establishing a cost-effective remote I/O system. Customers can benefit from ADAM-4000 modules through its simple wiring - using only two wires to communicate with their controller or other RS-485 devices. ADAM-4000 modules use the EIA RS-485 communication protocol; the industry's most widely used bi-directional, balanced transmission line suitable for industrial environments.

The robust ADAM-4100 series is designed for reliable operation in harsh environments and feature a wider -40C to +85C operating temperature range, higher noise immunity with isolated input/output and a broader 10V to 48V DC power input range.

Click here to learn more about the ADAM-4000 series remote I/O

The ADAM-6000 Remote Ethernet I/O series

In the past, integrating automation and enterprise systems required changing the entire architecture of the control system. The Advantech ADAM-6000 series accomplishes this integration easily using the latest internet technology to remotely monitor device status’ more flexibly.

Industrial Ethernet is fast becoming the de facto standard in industrial networks as its open network architecture provides seamless integration between layers. This makes the ADAM-6000 series an easy choice for your automation control system as they provide the most popular and open communication interfaces available.

Click here to learn more about the ADAM-6000 series Ethernet I/O modules

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.

Local Contact Makes a Difference

Guest Blog Post Earle Foster, VP of Sales and Marketing at Sealevel Systems

Advances in digital communications and information technology has made the world we share a smaller place. A mere 25 years ago when I first began my career in industrial electronics, the mail was the primary method of transferring information such as purchase orders, technical manuals, and any other written information. Engineers usually searched for products using industry magazines and vendor catalogs. Product distributors were primarily valuable in the logistics of moving products from the manufacturer to the customer.

Everything changed of course with the advent of email and the internet. Today we live in an age where customers expect immediate response to their requests, and manufacturers must find a way to meet these expectations if they expect to be successful. Sealevel Systems, Inc. has worked very hard to provide our customers the easy ability to access information, place orders, and receive technical support using our website and other assets. However, even in this digital age, our most important asset is the people that make up our team.

A critical component of the Sealevel team is our network of international distributors we call SeaPartners. One of our longest standing and most successful SeaPartners is Impulse Corporation in the United Kingdom. The team at Impulse is well trained on Sealevel products and does a fantastic job of taking care of our customers in the U.K. with support and services that cannot be replaced by a website or an email. It has been my pleasure to see Impulse continue to grow successfully while we have worked together, and we the value they add to Sealevel’s products and support for our customers.

Sealevel Partner Page

Discover our Live Chat system

On the 14th of February we launched our brand new website, and with it a number of new features to make it easier to find and obtain information about your product quickly and easily.

We appreciate it’s not always possible for you to pick up the phone, or spend time writing an email, just for a simple queston or enquiry. To help with this, we have introduced a new Live Chat function allowing you to get in contact with our sales team quickly to get answers to any enquires you may have.

What is Live Chat?

Live Chat is a system whereby you can talk to one of our technical sales team without having to wait for an email response. By typing messages, which will be responded to straight away by our technical team, you can get the answers you need quickly.

How do I use Live Chat?

The Live Chat system works in a similar way to most instant messaging services you may have used in the past. To start a discussion, simply click on the “Click here for live chat” button located at the lower left hand side of your screen. Select your enquiry type, enter your name and email address, and click Start Chat. Our team of technical sales staff will be alerted and will respond to your chat request as quickly as possible. You can then ask any questions and receive an instant answer.

Frequently asked questions:

Q. Do I need special software to use Live Chat?
A. No. Our Live Chat system will work on most Javascript enabled web browsers.

Q. What can I chat about, using this system?
A. The Live Chat service is ideal for receiving quick answers to basic technical and sales questions. If the discussion progresses to a point where more details is required, your Live Chat operator will be more than happy to take down your details and contact you at a convenient time.

Q. Can I request a copy of the discussion?
A. Yes. At the end of a discussion you have the option to email yourself a copy of the transcript.

Q. When is Live Chat available?
A. Live Chat is available during our standard business hours:

Monday: 9:00AM – 5:30PM
Tuesday: 9:00AM – 5:30PM
Wednesday: 9:00AM – 5:30PM
Thursday: 9:00AM – 5:30PM
Friday: 9:00AM – 5:30PM
Saturday: CLOSED
Sunday: CLOSED

Q. Where can I send feedback?
A. Once you have ended your chat, you have the ability to submit feedback about your experience. If your feedback is a little more in-depth, feel free to get in touch via our contact page.