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Street Surfing at ACCES - Now on CNN

Update: Now on CNN!


Sorrento Valley in San Diego had a bit of rain this morning. With rain in San Diego comes flooding, especially near the coasts.

ACCES employs a lot of surfers.

One of them, Aaron Peterson, decided to take a short break from the work day...because here at ACCES we don't let opportunities like that slip by...

Note: Don't try this at home.
 

PCI Express 48-bit DIO card with Change-of-State

Another entry in our PCI Express (PCIe) lineup has been shipping for a little while now, the PCIe-DIO-48S.

This board works just like our famous PCI-DIO-48S, and is pretty much identical all the way down to the pin out and software - while adding some useful tweaks to simply your system.

Labor Day Celebration

ACCES has always been a great place to work.

Every holiday we get together and celebrate.  Today is the Friday before Labor Day here in the USA, so we had a potluck picnic:

Today's potluck included loin of pork, carne asada, pan-fried rice, chili hot dish, barbecued hot dogs and drumsticks, lumpia, and ice cream, along with the usual chips and soda.

Our facility is nestled in a sheltered corner of the bustling Sorrento Valley.

Many of our employees hike the hillside across the street from us, or bike the Rancho Penasquitos Canyon Preserve across the train tracks.  Located about a mile from the beach we also have employees arrive to work still dripping from the waves at Scripps, Black's, or 8th Street.

Happy employees make happy customers.

PCI Express multi port RS-232

Our first PCI Express (PCIe) multi-port serial board family is ready to go!

The PCI-COM232-8 family of products includes low-profile (MD1) boards and normal PCIe versions, eight port and four port. All boards support 430kBaud RS-232, but you can also get 960kBaud versions, and we support custom baud rates like 64000 or 50000, just call us for details.

These new boards are supported in all flavors of Windows with a slick driver, but are also completely compatible with normal 16550 UARTs - the board can be used as if it were simply eight normal UARTs sitting in the system: every operating system should handle it great!

With 128kByte per-channel input and output FIFOs, up to 921.6kBaud RS-232 rates, and perfect compatibility you can't go wrong with the PCIe-COM232-8.

ACCES in the News

Our new and innovative products have received quite a bit of publicity in recent months. The Embedded Systems Conference in Silicon Valley was quite a success and the media has noticed. Click on the links below to learn more about the latest and greatest from ACCES.

Electronic Design, RTC Magazine, PC/104 and Small Form Factors Magazine, and EP&T have all noticed and supported our ideas. Check them out.

New PCI Express COM board

We've just shipped the first production units of a new serial communication product, the eight-port RS-232 PCIe-COM232-8L.

This great new board is tiny! Much smaller than the competition, it meets the MD1 size specification for Low-Profile PCI and PCI-Express cards.

In addition, this board is fully compatible with 16550 /16750 UARTS and applications, no 3rd-party drivers necessary.

This compatibility ensures any and every operating system is supported, right out of the box! Linux, Windows, even DOS programs, can use this unit without installing any additional drivers or software.

Speeds of up to 921.6kBaud, MD1 Low-Profile, PCI Express, Large FIFO Size, Eight RS-232 ports -- and an incredible low price -- make the PCIe-COM232-8L an instant winner.

The Early Web

Here's the very first web page ACCES put online, back in 1996.
Only two months later we redesigned the page -- definitely an improvement

A few more changes have gone by in the thirteen years since our first website designs, and we're proud of that progress. But things change, and we're continuing to advance our web presence every day.

Keep checking back to see the new things happening at accesio.com

--John Hentges
Webmaster
Then, and Now.

New USB/104 module: USB-DIO-48

Another great new product, the USB-DIO-48, shipping now.

Little brother to the USB-DIO-96, both boards have all the great USB/104 features:

• PC/104 compatible size and mounting holes
• high retention USB connector
• DIN-rail mounting options
• "OEM-B" alternate embedded USB interface header

as well as having 48 bits of 32mA source, 64mA sink tri-stateable digital input/output with jumper selectable pull-ups or pull-downs, per port!

Twitter

ACCES is now on Twitter. I never thought I would say it, but Oprah has inspired me. Does that mean Twitter is ka-put? You can find us at http://twitter.com/accesio

Software Release 7.51

We just sent the latest CD to the print house. ACCES Software Master CD 7.51 will be shipping soon.

The Software Downloads page will have the latest software by tomorrow afternoon.

The single biggest change is a new AIOUSB USB Software Reference Manual (.pdf).

In addition to the new AIOUSB manual the new CD contains software packages for several new products, including the USBP-DIO16RO8, the USB-DIO-48, the USB-DIO-96, and updated software for the USB-COM-2S.

How we got our name

ACCES I/O Products, Inc.

"ACCES"? That's not spelled right!

Well, actually it's an acronym.

Way back in 1987 or so, several years before we became incorporated, ACCES had a different name: Acquisition Control Communication Engineering / Systems.

As you can imagine that's a little unwieldy, so we were putting ACCES on our letterhead.

In 1992 when we incorporated, we chose to make the acronym official, and call ourselves "ACCES" -- but that name is fairly common in other parts of the world, as it is the correct spelling of "access" in french, for example.

In order to distinguish ourselves from the mere word acces, our chosen name became "ACCES I/O Products, Inc."

Still a little unwieldy, isn't it? We call ourselves "ACCES I/O" for short.

Tweaking a Design

In addition to our ~300 COTS products, we have a database of almost 700 "specials".

These Specials (designated by -Sxx numbers appended to a standard part number) are modifications to the base product that a customer, like yourself, asked us to make in order to tweak a design to fit their specific application better.

This broad database of "predesigned specials" is proof positive of our ability and willingness to serve the needs of our customers.

-- if you don't see a product in our broad lineup that perfectly suits your application, just call our Application Engineers -- with so many Specials already designed, and so many years worth of experienced engineers, you won't believe how easy - and inexpensive - it is to satisfy any requirement!

ACCES - The Source for All Your I/O Needs

Broad Product Selection - and custom!

Another fine thing is our dedication to service on the design side of things.

ACCES has almost 300 COTS products available for sale.

Most of these products began life as custom-engineering projects to satisfy the requirements of a single customer. When we take on engineering projects we try to save our customers as much money as possible, and one of the ways we can do that is by developing a product we know we'll be able to sell to the general public as well as the custom application that inspired it. This allows us to amortize the NRE costs across future sales to other people, greatly reducing the costs to the specific customer that needs a solution now.

This broad COTS product line, developed over the course of just ~22 years, demonstrates our hardware design prowess. If you need a data acquisition solution and can't find anything like it on our website, let us know.

About Customer Service

Hello, this is John Hentges. I am the primary technical support contact here at ACCES. More than 80% of all customer support calls and emails start with me, at my desk.

I have been with ACCES for more than twenty years, and, in addition to my work supporting you, I also manage the Software R&D lab, and write all the firmware for our products.

That's right! When you call for Technical support, you speak with an actual developer with over twenty years experience working with our products.

--And, for when a question comes in that's a little more hardware oriented than I feel I can handle, I have a team of hardware engineers with more than 121 years combined experience here at ACCES available to answer your questions.

Real service, real support.

Welcome to ACCES

Hello everyone, and welcome to the latest way ACCES is leveraging modern technology to stay in touch with you, our customers.

This is still in the experimental stages, but we're going to try providing more information about the inner workings of our great company.

Most posts won't allow comments, but please be respectful when you do comment. We want your feedback, but would prefer you keep it constructive.