Kestrel FlexAR Family Starts to Emerge!

At Traffex 2013 we introduced some conceptual products for a new family of devices. Later that year we had started in ernest to turn these ideas into reality. The concept products were interesting but not ideal as final product ideas. Early testing on hardware platforms were revealing. In all honesty, we did have to throw some of those ideas away and start again. As they say, you only learn from mistakes, and we’ve certainly made quite a few! Since the show, through the process of conception to design, we learnt an awful lot.

With the hardware well tuned we created our first practical designs and had the first hardware platform to develop our software by late summer. This is the time that many concepts start to flourish and when you start to find the good and the bad in what you have produced. It wasn’t long before the 2nd stage product was produced and then the third. This sounds like madness, but we are serious about getting our well thought out product working to its full potential. You can rush to market but you really don’t want to introduce something that doesn’t satisfy your own demanding standards.

So, with a great deal of testing and a lot of software development the final products were close to production readiness by Q2 2014. This does seem like a long time, but you have to remember this new line not only includes the Radar, but also a Modem, BlueTooth, GPS, ZigBee, Led Driver, two new LED Signs. To top the lot, a final change to accommodate a new enclosure!!! Why do things in serial fashion when you can do them all in parallel?!