User:Randyschafer/sandbox

ezLCD is a product line of smart Touchscreen LCD thin clients developed by EarthLCD starting in 2004. EarthLCD (TM) a dba of Earth Computer Technologies, Inc a California Corporation founded by Randy J. Schafer in 1994. Earth Computer Technologies was also a California Corporation founded in 1984 by the same founder and sold to Alloy Computer Products in 1990. The name was acquired back and re-incorporated in 1994. The ezLCD was the first color TFT LCD in a product genre sometimes referred to as a smart LCD or serial LCD. The goal of the ezLCD was to allow customers to get a color TFT LCD designed into a single purpose product in the shortest period of time without the expense and complexity of a windows or linux type operating system. Fixed firmware and no software updates and an instant boot time were other advantages. The devices that originally used ezLCD's were instruments such as antenna analyzers, network analyzers, and industrial controllers. Later medical device customers (medical lasers, liposuction, surgery assistive devices) latched onto the ezLCD because it simplified their design by separating the GUI portion of their design from the embedded critical part of their design. Also the complex supply chain of all the devices in the ezLCD lessoned the burden on the ezLCD customer. The 10 year lifecycle goal of the ezLCD was paramount for medical device designers. The first ezLCD consisted of an LCD, a separate LCD controller chip and a microcontroller. A proprietary bare metal software interface coded in 'c' that exposed a set of commands called the ezLCD Command API made it simple to do various GUI graphical functions such as draw text in a specific font, graphic drawing primitives. In 2012 Earth founder Randy Schafer met Arduino co-founder Massimo Banzi and committed to combine the ezLCD with the Arduino UNO platform. A year later the arLCD was introduced at the New York Maker Faire. This allowed for the creative force of the Maker Community to come up with new applications for the ezLCD and actually resulted into designs in a few low cost medical devices and recently a Covid-19 market air sanitizer.