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188 I-CONNECT007 I REAL TIME WITH... IPC APEX EXPO 2023 SHOW & TELL MAGAZINE Naim Kapadia of the Manufacturing Technol- ogy Centre shared her thoughts on the proj- ect's early success: "To be part of this project was to accelerate the art of the possible and help unlock some aspects of challenges of where to start connecting legacy equipment." Michael Ford of Aegis Software had this to say about the team and its accomplishments: "We are proud to be part of a great team that has created this IPC-CFX Legacy Box, which represents the opportunity for companies of all sizes and budgets, end-users, and vendors to fill communication gaps in the most cost- effective and safe ways." Zakary Smith and YenChi Chang, both of the Mata Inventive, commented on the project's future implications: "The CFX Raspberry Pi Legacy Box was one example of the many ways legacy equipment can be brought online for a seamless communication protocol through IPC-CFX. This showcases how fac- tories can leverage their existing equipment with new equipment to streamline the jour- ney to Industry 4.0." Helena Gurusamy of CloudVidia spoke on the impact of the project on the industry: "This will also be a game-changer for the industry as a whole because it removes barriers for those that do not want to replace their older equip- ment in order to digitize their factories." Pete Lomas of Norcott highlighted the impli- cations of the project's accessibility: "Based on our extensive design capability, in this case focused around the low cost of Rasp- berry Pi, we repurposed an existing project to provide a demonstrator for this exciting IPC-CFX initiative. Our CEM operations have three active manufacturing lines, and the ability to fill in the blanks for non-native CFX equipment will be critically important for driving efficiency." Participate in the Development of Solutions IPC thanks these volunteers for the work they did in such a short period of time. We now call on industry to build on their work by further developing this Factory of the Future project to help expand utilization of IPC-CFX in any piece of equipment. Those interested in learning more about or following the maturation of this project can join the IPC-CFX Standard Task Group. Those who can actively participate in the ongoing development of the SDK and hardware inter- face are invited to join the A-Team. Please email me at ChrisJorgensen@ipc.org for more information. S&T Chris Jorgensen is director of technology transfer at IPC. Above left: Zakary Smith of Mata Inventive, and Helena Gurusamy of CloudVidia. Above right: Michael Ford of Aegis Software.