Who would I approach to create an electronic device?

Try your local university’s engineering department. You may be able to make some contacts there.

Ooooh yeah great idea! Maybe I could even finagle an intern to do it for credit and then take all the glory on the cheap cheap for myself! Muahahaha!

Thanks for the tip @lillycoyote.

Any chance I have to take advantage of naive youth is much appreciated.

@RealEyesRealizeRealLies I live to serve. :-)

Another free resource is your local SCORE office. (Service Corps of Retired Executives).

If they match you up with the right person in this field, they would have a lifetime of experiences and contacts to share with you.

Oh right on @Buttonstc! Now I can dazzle both the young and old with my charlatan skills! I can’t make up my mind who would be more fun to take advantage of, the young or the old.

Thanks for the tip. Great advice!

It depends how long you wan ttot waitfor it to get done and how complicated is it? We use a small design house to get our stuff done. They specialize in the Cypress PSoC programmable system on chip. You can do anything with it. The whole prototype unit with labor only costs $10,000 with displays.

If you just need a few ICs and don’t care how long it takes then the university route is fine.

Thanks @worriedguy. Are they selling the chips or will they do the programming as well? Will they design for a specific housing? My device is not a stand alone. It’s designed to amplify an already existing device.

Cyprus sells the chip, controller, development board and software. Everything you need to get it going.
It saves us a lot of time. You basically draw what you want on your pc taking functions from a library of parts. For example, I want an amp here, a filter there, scale this by 3 and subtract 47 , filter the output to 50 kHz,put a counter timer here and display the answer.
Hit enter and the software “burns”’ the chip. You get about 1000 reprogramming cycles. That is usually enough.
First you need to build a prototype. It will not fit in a housing. After you get it going then you optimize to the size you want.
Does the unit take or use a lot of power? that will be one of the biggest factors in the design. Is it all CMOS? then it can run on a watch battery. Sendec near Rochester NY is one of the best places I have seen for small low power devices. They have an engine hour meter that picks up the electrical signal from the spark plug inductively and displays the hours for 12 years on a single battery without ever turning off. It fits in a 1 inch by 2 inch package ½ inch thick. The packaging is purely so you can read the display.
Full disclosure statement: I don’t work for Sendec nor do I have any financial interest in them. I have used them in the past.

Thanks @worriedguy. I feel inadequate to take it on at this level. I am not an electrician and neither do I have knowledge or interest in pursuing chip programming for myself. I can do nothing more than describe my intentions to an engineer and rely upon them to fit it all together. Yes, a working prototype to prove the technology is viable, so it doesn’t need to fit a particular housing initially. But the final design would need to be no larger than a cellphone, powered by 2 AAA or AA, and be capable of sensing, repeating, and amplifying an optical signal. I can point the way to optical slaves that sense and trigger a single pulse. But what level of instrument is needed to sense a millisecond multi-pulse signal, and repeat it instantly? Just sense, repeat, and send to a higher powered transmitter. That’s all.

Don’t say anything proprietary. But let me see if I understand:
You want to take an optical signal (ms range, pulse train, wavelength xyz nm) and repeat it (amplify gain of 1) .
First, you don’t need a Cyprus PSoc for this. You are not processing anything. This can be built with components.

There are still some questions that the designer will ask you:
Sensed light wavelength spectrum: broadband, multiple or single; intensity/power?
Transmitted light wavelength spectrum: broadband multi, single.; intensity/power?
Frequency and signal shape? square wave. i.e. is it on/ off or does the signal vary.
Do you want other people to see it or should it be piped somewhere?
Is the light focused?
Here are a couple of approaches:
You need a detector circuit: Could be an Optoisolator or even a cheap CDS cell:
You can then send via wire to another location and regenerate using Cree LEDs.
Or you can have a master/slave setup like on electronic flashes.
Or IR headphone amplifiers. They operate in the audio range sensing and retransmitting IR..
Or use three cheap detectors with RGB filters. Then you can regenerate with three LEDs.

Lots of questions but this should get you at least thinking about what to tell the designer.
Good luck with your project.

This sounds quite interesting. I probably wouldn’t be able to help as much as worriedguy, but I would definitely be interested. It seems like you need a more solid concept of the device before getting to the prototype phase and that would almost definitely require an engineer working with you one on one.

As far as what kind of engineers you’d need:

You’d want an electrical engineer obviously, but depending on the optics involved that may be enough. Unless you’re doing something really complicated with optics an electrical engineer could probably handle it.