Thinking Devices Incorporated

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Thinking Devices has numerous vendors, many of which are so tightly integrated into our operations that they are strategic partners.

Mechanical Design & Manufacturing
Kinemetrix Industrial Design & Manufacturing is our strategic partner for complex mechanical design, including solid modeling, finite element analysis and precision CNC machining. They're also a very good supplier of custom industrial machinery.
Kinemetrix Industrial Design & Manufacturing

Printed Circuit Board Manufacturing
There are a number of very good printed circuit board manufacturers. We can recommend two PCB houses that produce consistently high quality PCBs at affordable prices. The turnaround is as little as two or three days, so there is no longer any need for in-house PCB prototyping.
Advanced Circuits
AP Circuits

Electronic Components
There are distributors who supply large quantities of electronic components at slightly lower costs, but when considering ease of ordering and on-time delivery, it's hard to beat the large online and catalog electronics suppliers.
Digi-Key
Mouser

Commodity Components
It's good to have a supplier that stocks commodity parts which fill a 4000 page catalog, with fast and efficient online ordering and multiple warehouses with overnight delivery to most locations at UPS Ground shipping prices. There are less expensive sources for some commodity parts, but the cost difference is not worth processing a separate order unless the volume is very high.
McMaster-Carr

Electronic CAD (ECAD)
We use Eagle from CadSoft for all of our schematic capture, printed circuit board layout and autorouting. They provide extremely stable software that is powerful yet easy to learn and use. They provide quality software at reasonable prices.
CadSoft

Operating Systems
Thinking Devices has standardized on the Linux operating system for all our computing needs. Linux is fast and very reliable, making it ideal for desktop workstations, file servers, web servers, or dedicated computer hardware used in complex custom industrial machines. There are also no ongoing software maintenance fees. For desktop workstations, we prefer the Xandros distribution.
Xandros
Linux

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