Updating Products with Cheshire Engineering CorporationCheshire's over three decades in the business of product design and development experience gives us the techonlogy background to help you update or replace your legacy products.
The sage advice "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" keeps many legacy products going year after year. But eventually the definition of "broke" comes into focus: is the legacy products still manufacturable? Is it still profitable?
One of the things that often breaks legacy products is the Bill of Materials used to manufacture them -- the price and availability of the components. This can easily become "the" driving force behind a need to update or replace a legacy product. Cheshire can help your purchasing department review alternative parts to determine which are suitable replacements. In some cases we can re-design portions of the circuitry to use more available parts to provide the same function.
Legacy products are often based on older or proprietary connectivity solutions, or no connectivity at all. For example, a legacy factory instrument used a proprietary protocol on an RS-232 connection to allow remote setting of parameters and collection of data. Cheshire designed a connectivity solution that bridged that proprietary connection to Modbus -- an industry standard solution. And we did it in a small circuit board that physically replaced the RS232 transciever chip of the legacy product -- no external boxes and no modifications to the legacy product, beyond replacing one chip -- a 16-pin DIP which was already in a socket!
This allowed our client to roll out a new model of the legacy product, with a desireable new feature, at minimal cost. This "new" model became the sales bridge to keep the product line viable until a replacement model could be brought to market.