Biltronix serves companies in need of professional electronics design and production services. Biltronix is a company consisting of one person, myself... William Boucher. My main expertise lies in creating new systems from scratch for specific applications, whatever they may be. I have 30 years of experience studying the art of electronics and have spent the last 18 years working full time in the field. I have produced countless devices for the automotive industry for customers spanning the globe, some of which have been awarded patents. I have produced products for other companies that are available commercially. I have produced some products for the gaming industry and I have also created a number of my own custom items that I sell as Biltronix OEM products. Most of the time, I work on my own but for larger projects, I have worked jointly with other engineers. An example of this might be for complex mechanical design and 3D modeling of a custom gear train or an enclosure for a circuit board.

Capabilities include but are not limited to:

- Electronic circuit design and schematic capture.
- Printed circuit board design and manufacturing.
- Electronic component selection.
- Components procurement.
- Embedded controller (microcontroller) circuit design and programming.
- Windows application design and programming (to monitor or control electronic devices or systems).
- Custom mechanical design and machining.
- Production of complete electronic assemblies in both prototype and production volume quantities.
- Consultation
- Redesign of existing systems to reduce cost, component count, complexity of assembly, etc.

Experience also includes but is not limited to:

- Microcontroller circuit design and programming.
- Complex analog and digital circuits.
- Intelligent lighting controls.
- Motor and solenoid drivers.
- Open-loop and closed-loop controls for valves and actuators of all sorts.
- PC to embedded controller interfacing.
- Sensor circuits (positioning, speed, ranging, temperature, etc.)
- Serially controlled peripheral devices.
- LCD controllers.
- Low power serial RF and IR links.
- Extremely low power battery powered systems.
- Pin-thru-hole and surface mount packaging.
- Enclosure design and construction.
- Serial protocol converters.

The following photos (shown with permission from clients) are samples of recent work done.

This board (shown without the plastic enclosure) is a complex development controller for an experimental type of motorized linear valve actuator. It has far more features and capabilities than can be listed here and the back side has more components than the top side shown here. The controller includes both RS-232 and USB interfaces to the PC, intelligent motor controllers and drivers, lots of lights and analog and digital signal inputs and outputs, a large 4 line by 20 character lighted liquid crystal display, several programmable switches, and three in-circuit programmable microcontrollers.

The board measures about 6" x 10", has blue solder masks, immersion gold plating, 2 copper layers, and 2 white silkscreens.

 

Here is a magnified view of a small portion of the back side of the board shown above. The two large square chips actually measure only 10 mm per side and the lead pitch is just 0.031". These were soldered by hand for the prototypes. Hand soldering can be done on chips with lead pitch down to 0.025". The resistors and capacitors in the photo are 1206 size. The traces are 15 mil and the via's are 10 mil.

 

This photo shows a close up view of the USB interface (on the left side), a 3.3V voltage regulator (lower center), and some input signal buffers (along the right side). These circuits are a combination of 31 mil and 50 mil pitch IC's and 1206 components.

 

The board shown below is a custom serial programmer that I designed and programmed for a specific Phillips intelligent position sensor chip. It measures only about 3.5" x 2.5". I developed this programmer as a product development tool for automotive product engineers wanting to incorporate the position sensor IC into their engine-mounted valve assemblies. The board connects to a PC comm port. The Windows application that I wrote for this board automatically locates and connects to the board. At that point, the operator may read the data stored in the target sensor chip and instantly see all of the chip's operating parameters decoded and displayed both numerically and graphically. Simple on-screen controls allow the operator to instantly adjust all of the available parameters in real world units. At the click of a button, the sensor chip can be read, modified, and re-programmed. The programmer application even includes a totally automatic procedure for calibrating and zeroing the sensor chip after it has been installed inside a valve assembly. This allows the valves to be perfectly calibrated and tested after assembly in order to eliminate errors associated to assembly tolerance stack up. This programmer so improved product development whereever the sensor chip was used that it was quickly adopted by the entire company at all branches worldwide. A year later, Philips released a new and completely different sensor IC as a lower cost replacement for the previous chip. At that point, I adapted my programmer firmware and PC software to work with both chips.

All information of a proprietary nature is held in strict confidence.
Contract payments can be negotiated as a one-time payment for work done, or as royalties, or as a combination of both.