Company Celebrates 30 Years of LED Digital Gauges

It all started back in 1981 when a team of engineers from IBM who loved Corvettes and Star Wars saw a James Bond movie “The Spy Who Loved Me” with a Lotus Turbo Esprit that turned into a submarine with a red LED digital dash.

Soon they started designing and selling factory replacement Digital Gauges for 1968 to 1982 Corvettes under the trade name “2001 Technologies Corp.”. The company rapidly grew, so the engineers had to quit their daytime job to fulfill demand. Many gauges and other products were brought to market, including the “Night Rider Radar detector”.

The original brand name obviously had to be changed as the year 2001 approached. Cyberdyne was chosen for the gauges. Soon, word spread and demand grew for vehicles other than Corvettes. Owners of Camaros, Mustangs, Firebirds, Street Rods, Muscle Cars, and even Exotic Cars had requested products. The demand was too high for the engineering team to keep up so they decided to bring on investors/partners. In an effort to keep up with demand, half of the company was sold. As usual, it looked good on paper, but the relationship was short lived due to many problems and disagreements such as, new products were not forthcoming, lead times were long, and most importantly, the fact that the new partners were not car enthusiasts at all.

Inevitably, the remaining 50% of the company was sold to “Cyberdyne gauges” and the original engineers waited until the non-competes expired at which time in 1996, Intellitronix Corp. was formed. Intellitronix was located in Cleveland Ohio near Lake Erie. The engineers again started making digital gauges, but this time included a vast array of improvements including microprocessor circuitry, and much brighter leds. Due to the close proximity of the Great Lakes, it was inevitable that offshore power boating would get the attention of Intellitronix engineers. In addition to its collection of Corvettes and exotic sports cars, the company soon purchased a 45 foot Sonic power boat with triple 502 big block Chevy engines (yes triple!). This lead to a whole myriad of new marine products including digital panel meters for SeaRay boats among others.

After being frustrated with the antiquated marine speedometer that used a pitot tube to measure pressure, Intellitronix came up with a better idea. The engineers quickly developed and patented the “GPS controlled marine speedometer” patent number 6,353,781. When advertising was placed in “Power Boat” magazine, the owners of the magazine instantly saw the huge potential for this new technology and expeditiously made an offer to purchase the technology and the assets of Intellitronix before this new technology was made public. Although the company was not up for sale, the publishers insisted and offered an exorbitant amount of cash. Of course the engineers agreed and decided to retire early, late in the year 2000. Well, as usual, it looked good on paper, but the new company “Nordskog Performance Products” was also short lived due to the same exact reasons. After a few short years the company was sold to a couple of investment bankers and rapidly declined thereafter. When word got out about the decline of “Nordskog Performance Products”, the original engineers, being completely bored with retirement, tried to purchase “Nordskog Performance Products”. Unfortunately, the new owners of NPP were unwillingly to negotiate and a deal was never struck and that was the end of NPP. Since all the technology that NPP had been using was out dated from the 90’s, Intellitronix decided to once again reopen its own doors and develop all new circuitry.

After 30 years, Intellitronix is still the world wide leader in digital gauges, with state of the art technology utilizing brand new in-house robotic assembly SMT equipment, advanced RISC based microprocessors from www.microchip.com and super efficient custom designed LEDS from www.CREE.com.

LEDS have come a long way since 1981. Today they are seen in everything from led Police lights to indoor lighting and even TVs. Obviously LEDS have won the battle over vacuum fluorescent tubes and LCDs. Nobody has the knowledge, expertise and passion for digital gauges as Intellitronix does!