Case Study: Manufacturer of Measuring Instruments develops a compact OTDR with Promwad

Manufacturer of Measuring Instruments - Customer Case Study

Promwad worked with a manufacturer of measuring instruments to develop an Optical Time-Domain Reflectometer (OTDR) for optical data transmission networks. The customer needed a compact, multilingual device that could measure cable length, detect and locate faults, visualize data as graphs, support touchscreen and hardware-key control, save data to multiple storage media, communicate via Bluetooth, and operate reliably from mains power or battery.

Promwad delivered a custom embedded Linux solution built around a Texas Instruments AM3505 processor board with 128 MB LPDDR, 256 MB NAND, USB, MicroSD, and Bluetooth. The system used X-loader, U-Boot, Linux, and a Buildroot root filesystem, plus Qt-based software, QWT for graphing, v4l2 for the USB microscope, and bluez4 for Bluetooth. The result was a small OTDR measuring just 118 x 76 x 43 mm, with average power consumption under 5 watts, faster development thanks to Qt4, and a fault-tolerant firmware update system.