The challenge
Every Australia Post distribution centre relies on an infrared sensor to detect mail moving through high-speed sorting machines. The original part went obsolete. Without a replacement, millions of dollars of installed sorting systems would have become redundant and dysfunctional.
Nano Components commissioned Tekt to build a like-for-like plug-in replacement, covering both the infrared sensing electronics and the plastics injection moulding. Nothing on the machine side could change, so the new unit had to go in with no adjustment to the equipment around it.
The work
Reverse engineering the sensor
The original part was reverse engineered and then rebuilt across every layer of the hardware — the infrared emitter array, the LED drive system and the sensor processing behind interference-based presence detection at high speed. The result is a new sensor array rather than a reproduction of an unbuildable one.
The plastics are an optical component
The interesting part is the plastic. It is not a housing, it is an optical component. The original used IR-specific plastics whose infrared optical properties had to be replicated, and the geometry of the sensing region had to match the original design so the new units would drop straight in. Tekt took the plastics through injection moulding alongside the electronics, which is what made a genuine like-for-like part possible instead of a redesign the machines would have had to accommodate.
Into service
250 units were built and put into service across the fleet, keeping the installed sorting systems running on a part that had ceased to exist. The designs were handed to Nano Components so the company can keep manufacturing as it needs to.
About the client
Nano Components supplies sensing hardware for industrial applications and held the customer relationship for this work. The end user is Australia Post, across whose distribution centres the replacement sensors are in service.
