A local medical manufacturer was experiencing  success and found themselves significantly short on staff for a development program.  Quest was engaged to support the development effort.  The complexity of the system was significant with a desired throughput of 300 assays per hour and an assay that required 15 minutes per sample.  Quest staff was responsible for overall program management and the electrical design.  The design embodied 9 PowerPCs running PSOS that communicated via RS-485 to 70+ peripheral controllers.  This distributed architecture was very extensible and flexible to adapt to the dynamic nature of the program.  The team for this program grew to 60 people and embodied mechanical, electrical, software and optics.  Some of the key challenges included system architecture, thermal control, heat transfer, fluidics, finite element analysis of thermal and mechanical designs and the coordination of the multidisciplinary team.