Company Focus I Brainboxes
Celebrating 30 years in business
Brainboxes is helping scientists to retrieve data from a remote desert telescope in northern Chile pointing at distant galaxies light years away
Established in 1984 Brainboxes, a company that specialises in the development of serial communication devices, is celebrating 30 years in business. Neil Tyler went to Liverpool to meet with the company's founder and driving force, Chairman and Managing Director, Eamonn Walsh
A
n anniversary is worth celebrating and this year Brainboxes, a Liverpool based developer and manufacturer of serial communication devices, is celebrating 30 years in business. With considerable experience in both hardware and software design skills the company has been able to pull together a team of highly qualified designers, a world-class in-house manufacturing capability and has established a global distribution network. Setting up in 1980's Liverpool was no easy task but the company has survived, grown and established itself as a leading provider of innovative data communications products. According to founder, Chairman and Managing Director Eamonn Walsh, "We aim to provide customers with the necessary equipment to 'Connect. Configure and Control' their serial devices
and those customers come from a wide range of industries such as retailing and finance, medical and industrial and scientific."
The company's success is in no small part driven by its commitment to supply the very best and this is supported by a laser-like focus on continuous research and development. Around 40 per cent of all its employees are involved in R&D whether that's in chip design or board layout, including firmware or device driver and application software engineering. Brainboxes' success can be attributed to its ability in pulling together and combining in-house skills and manufacturing capabilities. These skills have been developed and nurtured over the past 30 years and mean that today it is well placed to deliver 'custom design – perfect fit' products which meet the needs of
customers' applications exactly and which can all be done at a very competitive price. With a modern and flexible production facility which houses a single mount production line capable of single and double sided assembly Brainboxes is able to offer great flexibility, which when combined with camera-guided precision placement and the ability to manage rapid changeover between products means it can deal with all manner of new product designs. At the heart of the business is Eamonn
Walsh. A graduate of Liverpool University with a degree in Physics and a Masters in Electronics Engineering and Electronics he founded the company with his wife in 1984.
Initially Walsh started his career as a teacher.
"I came to Liverpool in the early 1970s and after graduation worked as a teacher. I enjoyed teaching the brighter kids but couldn't cope with the 'lion-taming', so I left and found a job selling computers for a business based up here. As I began to sell more products so I thought I should at least get to understand how they actually worked.
"After four years I ended up as the company's technical director. It was a great environment to work in as I was encouraged to innovate. We managed to
Brainboxes' MD Eamonn Walsh
come up with a range of very successful designs but the climate turned against us in the early 1980s and after I was made redundant in 1984 I set up Brainboxes." The first few years were tough. "We expected them to be. While I set the business up with equipment I got as part of my severance package and had numerous meetings with companies to discuss producing some of my designs, it was a difficult time. I met with Amstrad for example but nothing came of that and I had a young family to look after. I saw an
18 October 2014
Components in Electronics
www.cieonline.co.uk
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