US 10175134

I'll search for litigation and docket information on this specific patent, then summarize.

Let me run a couple more targeted searches on the litigation side.

Litigation / docket check (searched first, as requested)

No litigation found. I searched for US 10,175,134 in Federal Circuit / district-court / PTAB contexts and found no CAFC 2026 docket, no district-court action, no IPR/PGR, and no ITC proceeding involving this patent or its assignee, Nagano Keiki Co., Ltd. The patent's own Google Patents record likewise lists no litigation events — only prosecution/assignment/maintenance-fee entries (assignment 2016-08-31; grant 2018-12-19; 4th-year maintenance fee paid 2022-05-20, "large entity").

I want to be explicit about the limits of this: a web search is not the same as a PACER/Docket Alarm/CAFC-oral-argument query, and absence of search hits is not proof of nonexistence. If you need a negative finding you can rely on, this should be confirmed against PACER (National Docket, as co-defendant/patent-in-suit) and the CAFC's own docket/opinion archive for calendar year 2026.

⚠️ Number-collision warning: searching the bare string "10175134" surfaces an unrelated European application EP 10175134.5 (STMicroelectronics, "Dual interface IC card," 2010), which is not this patent and should not be conflated with it. The US patent has 8 digits (10,175,134); the EP number has a 7+1 dot format. Interpreted literally, they are different identifiers.

US 10,175,134 B2 — Physical quantity measuring device

All bibliographic data below is taken from the patent's own front matter, which is the authoritative source.

Note on inventor/assignee data: one third-party aggregator (Patent Leaderboard) lists Toshinori Suzuki under "Kddi." That appears to be an aggregator artifact. The patent's own front page and the recorded assignment (REEL/FRAME 039606/0884, effective 2016-07-19) assign all four inventors' interest to NAGANO KEIKI CO., LTD., so I treat Nagano Keiki as the controlling assignee.

Abstract (as issued)

A controller includes: a communication attachment member configured to be detachably attached to a measuring device body; a second light emitter/receiver provided to a communication attachment member and configured to transmit/receive a signal to/from a first light emitter/receiver of the measuring device body; and a second controller configured to transmit/receive a signal to/from the second light emitter/receiver. An electronic circuit unit, electronic calibration unit, first control unit, signal transmission unit and the first light emitter/receiver are provided inside a housing of the measuring device body. A window is hermetically provided to a plate of the measuring device body. The communication attachment member includes a cover configured to be disposed so that the second light emitter/receiver faces the window and an engagement portion provided to the cover to be engageable with the housing.

Independent claims in plain language

Claim 1 — the base apparatus claim.

A physical-quantity measuring device with two halves:

(a) A measuring device body having —

• a housing with a cylindrical case;
• a plate sealing the first (top) open end of the case;
• a detector at the second (bottom) open end that senses a physical quantity of a target fluid (the embodiment describes pressure via a strain gauge on a sensor module);
• an electronic circuit unit that receives the detector's signal;
• an electronic calibration unit that calibrates that circuit unit;
• a first control unit that handles an external signal;
• a signal transmission unit wired to the first control unit; and
• a first light emitter/receiver on the transmission unit that sends/receives the external signal.

(b) A controller having —

• a communication attachment member removably attachable to the measuring device body;
• a second light emitter/receiver on that attachment member that talks both ways to the first light emitter/receiver; and
• a second controller that receives from and sends to the second light emitter/receiver.

The particular structural requirements: a window for the optical link is hermetically mounted in the plate; all the electronics (circuit unit, calibration unit, first control unit, transmission unit, first emitter/receiver) sit inside the housing; the attachment member has a cover positioned so the second emitter/receiver faces the window, plus an engagement portion on the cover that engages the housing; the plate has a cylindrical portion; and the cover has a recess that contacts the outer circumference of that cylindrical portion.

Plain-language gist: put the calibration electronics and an infrared transceiver permanently sealed inside the gauge, and provide a snap-on optical coupler that optically aligns a handheld controller to a hermetic window — so calibration is done by light through a sealed glass, not by opening the case or turning a screwdriver-actuated trim pot.

Claim 4 — a second independent claim that re-states all of claim 1's measuring-device-body and controller elements (including the cover/engagement portion), and then adds:

• the controller has a controller body containing the second controller, joined to the attachment member by a cord carrying the signal;
• the cord is detachable from the controller body; and
• the controller body itself has a third light emitter/receiver that can send/receive directly with the first light emitter/receiver.

Plain-language gist: the same system, but the handheld unit can be used two ways — tethered through a cord to a remote coupling head, or detached and pointed straight at the gauge's window.

Dependent claims

• Claim 2 (dep. 1): adds a signal checker that verifies signal transmission/reception between body and controller, and specifies that the link is an infrared signal. (The spec explains this checks link quality by flashing IR pulses and comparing transmitted vs. counted received pulses — something you can't do for RF by measuring field strength in advance.)
• Claim 3 (dep. 1): the controller comprises a controller body bearing the second controller plus the cord between body and attachment member.
• Claim 5 (dep. 1): the plate has a connection pin (connected to the signal transmission unit) surrounded by the cylindrical portion, and the engagement portion is an engagement piece that grips the outer circumference of the cylindrical case.
• Claim 6 (dep. 4): the same pin/cylindrical-portion/recess/engagement-piece details as claim 5, applied to the claim-4 system.

Stated objective (for context)

The specification frames the invention against two problems: (i) zero-point calibration and contact-point output setting on assembled gauges required a screwdriver-operated trimmer inside the case, forcing a complicated waterproof design; and (ii) wireless (RF) communication is disturbance-prone and link stability was checked only by checksum/parity on the data, never as a channel-quality question. The claimed hermetic window plus optical coupling is the stated answer to both.

Uncertainty flags

• No litigation verified — see caveat above; treat "no CAFC 2026 docket" as unconfirmed by authoritative docket sources.
• Family status: EP 3139146 B1 is shown as "not-in-force" on the Google Patents page; the operative status entry is that of the US patent (Active, expires 2037-03-16, which is a terminal-disclaimer/PTA-adjusted date, so I would not treat it as a legal conclusion).
• Everything under "Claims" and "Abstract" above is quoted/paraphrased directly from the issued patent text, not from secondary sources.

I'll search for litigation involving US patent 10175134 across patent litigation databases.

Initial results are noise. Let me search more targeted litigation databases.

Let me search litigation-specific databases and PTAB records.

Litigation Search Report — U.S. Patent No. 10,175,134

Bottom line

I found no record of any litigation (district court, ITC, CAFC, or PTAB) involving U.S. Patent No. 10,175,134. To the extent this patent has been asserted or challenged, I could not confirm it from the sources available to me. The absence of results should be treated as "no known litigation," not as an affirmative certification that none exists.

Patent identification (literal reading)

• U.S. Patent No. 10,175,134 B2 — "Physical quantity measuring device"
• Application No. 15/252,703; filed 2016-08-31; granted 2019-01-08
• Priority: JP 2015-172563, filed 2015-09-02
• Assignee: NAGANO KEIKI CO., LTD. (Japan)
• Inventors: Takayuki Ite, Yasuyuki Suzuki, Toshinori Suzuki, Hideki Muramatsu
• Family members: JP6396868B2, EP3139146B1 / EP3139146A1, US2017/0059438A1
• Status: Active, adjusted expiration 2037-03-16

What I searched and what I found

False positives I explicitly excluded

Searches for "the '134 patent" returned several unrelated patents that must not be conflated with 10,175,134:

• STA Group v. Motorola — different '134 patent (case filed Sept. 30, 2022)
• Uniloc v. Motorola / Apple — different '134 patent (Uniloc MDL)
• Finesse Wireless LLC v. AT&T Mobility / Nokia — different '134 patent (Fed. Cir. / SCOTUS No. 25-953)
• Autonomous Devices v. Tesla — different '134 patent (Dojo supercomputer)
• EP2296109B8 — same number string as an EPO application number, but a completely different subject matter and authority.

None of these involve Nagano Keiki or the "physical quantity measuring device" of U.S. 10,175,134.

Caveats on completeness

1. The Unified Patents litigation portal and PACER/CAFC dockets were not directly reachable as full structured databases in my searches; I could not run a definitive docket-number query against them. My conclusion rests on open-web and document-level searches.
2. Nagano Keiki is a Japanese instrument maker whose U.S. enforcement activity (if any) may be limited and/or reflected only in Japanese-language sources, which limits detection.
3. Because this is a 2019-granted patent in the pressure/temperature sensor field, any future assertion would most likely appear in district court dockets or as a PTAB petition; neither was found as of this search.

Recommendation

Before relying on this "no litigation" conclusion for any legal purpose, verify directly against:

• Unified Patents Portal litigation caselist and PTAB caselist (search by patent number)
• PACER / CourtListener RECAP docket search for "10,175,134"
• USPTO Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) API/Portal for post-grant proceedings
• CAFC docket search
• USITC EDIS (Section 337 investigations)

If you can point me to a specific docket or a party name, I can attempt to confirm or exclude it. As it stands, I have no confirmable litigation to report for U.S. Patent No. 10,175,134.

I'll verify the ODP-based "no proceedings" signal with independent web searches before reporting.

Initial searches surfaced nothing on-point. Let me run more targeted queries against PTAB-style dockets and the patent's family.

No hits so far. A couple more targeted checks to be thorough.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on file for US 10,175,134: 0. The structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block (USPTO Open Data Portal, most recent ingest) returns no IPRs, PGRs, or CBMs — no active proceedings, no claims invalidated, no claims sustained, no settlements, no institution denials. I independently ran four targeted web searches (patent-number + "IPR"; "Nagano Keiki" + IPR/PTAB + petition; PTAB docket-number patterns IPR20xx against the patent; and litigation searches tying the patent number to a defendant); every hit was off-target (e.g., a European patent whose application number coincidentally reads "10175134.5" — EP2296109B8 for an STMicroelectronics dual-interface IC card, which is unrelated to this US patent). The defensive posture this gives a defendant is not "the patent is hardened" and not "the claims are dead." It is: the patent has never been tested at the PTAB, so every one of claims 1–6 is UNTESTED and the prior-art field is wide open — but you would be the first petitioner, with no roadmap.

Two framing corrections that matter for a defendant here:

1. This is not a troll patent. The assignee is Nagano Keiki Co., Ltd., a Japanese operating company (pressure gauges/sensors, Tokyo Stock Exchange–listed since 2005; its IR history shows a 1988 Dresser licensing relationship and a 2006 acquisition of Ashcroft Holdings). That corporate profile — not an NPE — is consistent with a low-assertion patent, which in turn explains the absence of IPRs: patents attract IPRs when they are asserted, not when they merely issue. See Nagano Keiki's corporate history at the company's annual report page: https://www.naganokeiki.co.jp/userfiles/files/IR/annual_select/Annual%20Select%[202021](/patent/202021).pdf
2. Do not infer "never asserted" from "never IPR'd." Absence of PTAB activity does not prove absence of district-court or ITC assertion. I found no litigation tying this patent number to a defendant, but my searches were not exhaustive of PACER/Docket Navigator, and this is a case where I'd rather flag a coverage gap than assert a negative I can't ground.

Since there are no proceedings, there are no per-proceeding sections to fill. Nothing below is fabricated to fill the template.

Strategic summary

Claim status. All six claims of US 10,175,134 are UNTESTED: claim 1 (independent), claim 2 (depends from 1 — signal checker + infrared signal), claim 3 (depends from 1 — controller body + detachable cord), claim 4 (independent — the cord/third light emitter-receiver variant), claim 5 (depends from 1 — connection pin + engagement piece), and claim 6 (depends from 4 — connection pin/cylindrical portion/recess + engagement piece). There is no CANCELED claim and no SUSTAINED claim, because no tribunal has ruled. Note the claim set is small — two independent claims, both of which already recite the "cylindrical portion"/"recess" engagement structure (claim 1) and the cord-plus-third-transceiver architecture (claim 4). In the specification, those very features are presented as separate advantages (advantage (8) for the recess/cylindrical-portion alignment; advantages (5)–(6) for the cord and third light emitter/receiver), which is a signal that claim 1 and/or claim 4 were narrowed during prosecution. The file wrapper is worth pulling before you build an invalidity case: the prosecution history lists a Japanese Office Action with English translation dated 2018-04-17 and a European Search Report dated 2017-01-31 as the only non-patent citations. Those two documents will tell you what the examiner and the JPO considered close.

Estoppel landscape. Because there are no IPRs or PGRs, there is no § 315(e)(2) estoppel in effect against anyone. No petitioner exists, so no petitioner or privy is barred from raising any § 102/§ 103 ground in a district court or ITC action. Conversely, nothing protects the patent owner either: there is no FWD to point to, no Board claim construction, no finding of non-obviousness that would make an IPR-based defense legally harder. If you file, you are writing on a clean sheet, and the § 315(b) one-year clock from service of an infringement complaint is the only timing constraint on an IPR.

Pattern signals. No repeated-petitioner pattern (no petitioners at all). No patent-owner PTAB appeal history, hence no Federal Circuit appeal docket to report. No defensive aggregator (Unified Patents, RPX, etc.) anywhere in the chain — the only third-party activity on the family I surfaced is unrelated European prosecution and patent-office citation of other Nagano Keiki patents as prior art against third parties. The family itself is small: US 10,175,134 (granted 2019-01-08, adjusted expiry 2037-03-16, maintenance fee paid at the 4-year mark on 2022-05-20), JP 6396868 B2, and EP 3139146 B1 (granted 2018-07-25; Google Patents shows the EP member as not-in-force, but I would verify that against the EPO Register rather than rely on the Google status flag). Two later-sibling Nagano Keiki physical-quantity-measuring-device patents (JP 6564358 B2, JP 6931343 B2) cite this family but are not PTAB proceedings.

Recommended next steps

• If you are a defendant: there is no FWD to quote, because none exists — I will not manufacture a disposition. Your leverage is entirely forward-looking. Before filing anything, pull the full file wrapper (the 2018-04-17 JPO office action and the 2017-01-31 EPO search report are your two named leads) to identify the art the examiner already saw and the amendments that went in. That determines whether a § 325(d) discretionary-denial fight is likely, and whether the narrowed claim-1/claim-4 limitations give you a clean § 103 story.
• Timing: if you have been served, calendar the § 315(b) one-year bar immediately — it is the only hard deadline, and there is no joinder path to a pre-existing IPR because there is no pre-existing IPR on this patent.
• Venue/forum check: confirm whether Nagano Keiki or a licensee has ever asserted this patent, in district court or at the ITC. My searches did not surface an assertion, but the PTAB-activity signal alone cannot rule one out; verify against PACER and Docket Navigator before you characterize the patent as unasserted to a client.
• What to say plainly: the correct statement to a client is "no PTAB activity exists on US 10,175,134 as of 2026-09-30." That is itself information — well-asserted patents eventually attract IPRs, so the absence of any petition suggests a low-assertion, operating-company-held patent. It is not, however, a validity opinion, and I would not present it as one.

Sources checked: the structured ODP "PTAB proceedings on file" block (canonical, zero results); Google Patents full text and family/citation data for US 10,175,134 (https://patents.google.com/patent/US10175134/en); four independent web searches for PTAB and litigation activity, all negative. USPTO PTAB E2E and CourtListener were not directly queryable in this session — if you need a belt-and-suspenders confirmation, that is the gap to close.

I'll verify the assignment record and ownership context before writing the reconstruction.

Let me check litigation, NPE directories, and Nagano Keiki's corporate status.

Ownership Reconstruction — US 10,175,134 B2

Scope note / data source: The assignment entries below are reconstructed from the patent's own front-matter and legal-events record (Google Patents, fetched 2026-09-24), which mirrors the USPTO Assignment Center data. The fetched record exposes exactly one post-filing assignment event and gives its reel/frame and effective date but not the recorded correspondent. I did not have live Assignment Center access in this session, so the correspondent field is flagged as a gap rather than filled. Search-confirmed corroboration of the entity names is cited below.

⚠️ Number-collision reminder (carried forward): searching the bare string "10175134" repeatedly returns EP 10175134.5 (STMicroelectronics, "Dual interface IC card / IC-Karte mit doppelter Schnittstelle," filed 2010-09-02, proprietor STMicroelectronics International N.V., Geneva). That is a different identifier and a different patent. Everything below concerns US 10,175,134 B2 / US 15/252,703 only. My first search for "US 10175134 assignment Nagano Keiki reel frame 039606/0884" returned only that EP document — the collision is persistent and worth re-flagging.

Inventors

All four are listed with a Tokyo address of record (Justia patent record for 10,175,134), consistent with Nagano Keiki's HQ at 1-30-4 Higashimagome, Ota-ku, Tokyo 143-8544. The recorded assignment (reel/frame 039606/0884) names all four as assignors to NAGANO KEIKI CO., LTD., so the employer identification is direct evidence from the assignment instrument, not inference from the address.

Unusual-pattern check — none found. Specifically:

• There is no inventor-severance signal. There is only one assignment link and it runs to the employer, not away from it. No subsequent assignment by any individual inventor appears in the record.
• The assignment was executed 2016-07-19, i.e. ~6 weeks before the US filing date (2016-08-31). This is an ordinary pre-filing employee invention assignment, not a fire-sale precursor. (Carried-forward caveat: one aggregator, Patent Leaderboard, lists Toshinori Suzuki under "Kddi," which conflicts with the assignment instrument's assignor listing; I continue to treat that as an aggregator artifact, as noted in the prior section.)
• No public record located of a named inventor subsequently forming an assertion entity around this family.

Original assignee

NAGANO KEIKI CO., LTD. (長野計器株式会社) — Tokyo, Japan. Named as assignee on the issued patent, on the pre-grant publication US 2017/0059438 A1, and as assignee-of-record on reel/frame 039606/0884.

Does it ship a product embodying the claims? Yes — and this is well corroborated, not inferred. Nagano Keiki is a TSE Prime-listed operating company (ticker 7715), founded 1896, and is described as the global volume leader in mechanical pressure gauges (Japanese market share reportedly >60% by sales) with consolidated revenue of ¥67,691 million for FY ended 2026-03-31 (Nagano Keiki "Annual Select 2026"; MarketWatch/Nikkei corporate profiles). Its product lines map directly onto this patent's subject matter: pressure gauges, pressure sensors, transmitters, digital pressure gauges, air-leak testers, and measurement & control equipment, plus a stated R&D emphasis on pressure transmitters and semiconductor-industry pressure devices. The spec itself describes the measuring device body 2 as "a pressure measuring device configured to measure a pressure of a target fluid," and the detector 8 as a strain-gauge sensor module — i.e. the claimed device is the company's core commercial product category, not a licensing shell's abstract asset.

Current status: Operating. Publicly traded, not acquired, not in bankruptcy, no restructuring event located in any source reviewed. The patent's own legal-events record shows a 4th-year maintenance fee paid 2022-05-20, entity status "large entity" — consistent with a solvent corporate owner rather than a small-entity shell (shells typically claim micro/small entity to halve fees). Patent status remains Active with an adjusted expiration of 2037-03-16.

Assignment timeline

One recorded assignment exists.

• 2016-07-19 (executed) / recorded 2016-08-31 — Reel 039606/0884
  • Conveyance: Assignment — "ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNORS INTEREST (SEE DOCUMENT FOR DETAILS)"
  • Assignor: ITE, TAKAYUKI; SUZUKI, YASUYUKI; SUZUKI, TOSHINORI; MURAMATSU, HIDEKI (all four named inventors, jointly)
  • Assignee: NAGANO KEIKI CO., LTD. (Japan)
  • Correspondent: Not captured in the source text. The fetched legal-events entry for reel/frame 039606/0884 ("Owner name: NAGANO KEIKI CO., LTD., JAPAN … Effective date: 20160719") does not display the correspondent of record. This is a genuine data gap, not a null result — it must be read off the Assignment Center cover sheet. Because there is only one link in the chain, the "repeat correspondent" signal cannot be evaluated in any event: repetition requires at least two links.
  • Context: Pre-filing employee invention assignment (inventors → employer), executed ~6 weeks before the US filing date. Standard corporate practice. Not a fire-sale, not a securitization, not a transfer to an asserter, not a change of name. No cash consideration is disclosed in the text as fetched.

Post-issuance assignments: NONE. There is no assignment recorded after the 2019-01-08 grant date — no transfer to an IP-holding subsidiary, no security agreement, no license or release recording, no change of name. The only other entry in the legal-events feed is the 2022-05-20 maintenance-fee payment (M1551, large entity), which is an administrative fee event, not a conveyance.

Family cross-check: The family comprises JP 6396868 B2 (active) and EP 3139146 B1 (listed as not-in-force on Google Patents). The EP member lapsing while the US member is maintained is a narrowing, not a monetization signal — it indicates the owner is letting less-commercially-relevant coverage drop rather than assembling a licensing portfolio. I have not verified Assignment Center / EPO Register for the JP and EP members; treat the EP lapse as reported-status only.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 10175134
    2015 : Priority JP 2015-172563 filed
    2016 : US application 15/252/703 filed
         : Inventors assign to Nagano Keiki
         : Reel 039606 frame 0884 recorded
    2019 : Patent issues as US 10175134 B2
    2022 : Year four maintenance fee paid

NPE / troll-pattern signals

1. Shell-entity transfer — NOT PRESENT.
No transfer to any entity at all. The chain consists of a single link, reel 039606/0884, dated 2016-07-19 / recorded 2016-08-31, running from four individuals to an operating public company. There is no "IP / Patents / Licensing / Holdings / Ventures" successor anywhere in the record, no registered-agent service address (the assignee of record is a 130-year-old Tokyo manufacturer at 1-30-4 Higashimagome, Ota-ku), and no single-member Delaware/Texas LLC.

2. Known asserter in the chain — NOT PRESENT.
The only assignee ever of record is Nagano Keiki Co., Ltd. I compared the chain against the enumerated list (Acacia Research, Marathon Patent Group, Intellectual Ventures, IPNav, Wi-LAN, Mosaid/Conversant, Vringo, Pendrell, Innovatio IP Ventures, MPHJ, Lumen View, Round Rock Research, Document Generation Corp, Spangenberg entities). No match, at any point in the chain. Targeted searches for "Nagano Keiki" in RPX / Unified Patents NPE contexts returned nothing linking this patent or this assignee to an NPE campaign.

3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — UNCLEAR / INEVALUABLE.
The correspondent of record for reel 039606/0884 was not captured in the source text (see the gap noted in the timeline). More fundamentally, the signal is structurally inapplicable: recurrence requires multiple links, and there is one. I decline to name a correspondent I did not retrieve.

4. Cascading transfers — NOT PRESENT.
Zero consecutive assignments through chained entities. The count is 1 total assignment in ~9.5 years of file history (filed 2016-08-31; today 2026-09-30), which is the opposite of a cascade.

5. Pre-litigation transfer — NOT PRESENT.
No infringement suit naming this patent was located in the prior-section litigation sweep, so there is no suit date against which a 6-month pre-suit transfer could be measured. Independently: there has been no assignment since issue (2019-01-08), so no transfer exists that could have been timed to enable assertion.

6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — NOT PRESENT.
No Chapter 7 / 11 event. Nagano Keiki is a going concern with ~¥67.7bn FY2026 revenue, and the record shows a large-entity maintenance-fee payment on 2022-05-20 — the owner was paying fees voluntarily, not liquidating assets.

7. Privateering — NOT PRESENT.
Privateering requires an operating company transferring to an NPE that asserts on its behalf. Nagano Keiki has transferred to no one, and no Nagano Keiki–behind-an-NPE campaign surfaced in RPX/Unified searches. No SEC 8-K/10-K angle exists to check: as a Tokyo Stock Exchange issuer, Nagano Keiki files Japanese statutory reports (I reviewed the FY2026 "Annual Select" shareholder report, which is a pure operating-business disclosure with no patent-monetization content) rather than SEC periodic reports.

8. Defensive aggregator (anti-NPE) — NOT PRESENT.
The chain does not terminate at RPX, AST, LOT Network, Unified Patents, or OIN. It terminates where it started — at the original operating company. Note that a patent this narrow (6 claims, 2 independent) in a core product class is an unlikely defensive-aggregation candidate in any case.

Corroborating non-signal: the legal-events feed contains no PTAB post-grant proceeding, no ITC action, no third-party prior-art submission event, and no reexamination — i.e. the patent has never been the subject of a challenge that would typically accompany assertion activity.

Verdict

Insufficient data — applying the rubric's literal definition ("no records, or only the original assignment"), which is precisely this case.

I want to be explicit that this label reflects a procedural definition, not substantive uncertainty about NPE status. Substantively, this is a clean single-assignment chain: reel 039606/0884, executed 2016-07-19 and recorded 2016-08-31, conveys the four named inventors' interest to NAGANO KEIKI CO., LTD., which is a TSE Prime-listed manufacturer (ticker 7715) that ships pressure gauges, transmitters and digital pressure gauges directly embodying the claims, paid the 4th-year maintenance fee as a large entity on 2022-05-20, and has never transferred the patent to anyone. All eight NPE signals return not present except signal 3, which is invaluable because a one-link chain has no recurrence to measure. There is no basis on this record to call it an NPE, and there is no product-plus-litigation record to satisfy the "operating-company assertion" label either — because no litigation exists.

What would move this off "insufficient data": (a) the recorded correspondent name/firm for reel 039606/0884, to close the one genuine gap and to enable cross-chain recurrence testing against other Nagano Keiki recordings; and (b) a PACER/Assignment-Center negative confirmation that no post-2019 assignment was recorded but not surfaced in the Google Patents mirror.

Verify at: USPTO Assignment Center — https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (search patent number 10175134; the legacy front end at https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html surfaces the same records). Cross-reference PEDS/ODP for the application, and EPO Register for EP 3139146 B1.

I'll verify the patent record and pull details on each cited reference.

Now let me pull the remaining references.

Scope, method, and a note on sources

I searched for US 10,175,134 by its number, title, and application number (15/252,703) and pulled the citation tables from the patent's own Google Patents record (the authoritative source here), then chased individual references. I make no claim to having run a USPTO Patent Public Search / PatentCenter file-wrapper query — what follows is grounded in the patent's own front matter and citation lists plus targeted web retrieval of the references themselves. Where I could not verify a reference's actual disclosure in this session, I say so explicitly rather than characterizing it.

On the "strict, literal identifier" rule: I read US 10,175,134 B2 (8-digit US grant, app 15/252,703) as the subject patent throughout. I am not conflating it with EP 10 175 134.5 (STMicroelectronics, Dual interface IC card, filed 2010-09-02) — that collision was already flagged in the earlier section and remains a different document.

Bibliographic confirmation: title Physical quantity measuring device; assignee Nagano Keiki Co., Ltd. (assignment REEL/FRAME 039606/0884, effective 2016-07-19); inventors Ite, Y. Suzuki, T. Suzuki, Muramatsu; filed 2016-08-31; priority JP 2015-172563 (2015-09-02); granted 2019-01-08; 6 claims (2 independent — 1 and 4). Status Active, adjusted expiration 2037-03-16.

The 13 cited references, and how the citation split breaks down

The record shows 13 patent citations. On the Google Patents page, only four carry the examiner-citation flag; the remainder are Japanese/European family members surfaced by the European Search Report dated 2017-01-31 and the Japanese Office Action with English translation dated 2018-04-17 (both listed as non-patent citations). That distinction matters: the JP- and EP-listed documents were not necessarily the US examiner's §102 rejections.

§102 statutory frame. Because the application was filed 2016-08-31, AIA 35 U.S.C. §102 governs. The critical date is the claimed priority date, 2015-09-02. So any reference published before 2015-09-02 is available under §102(a)(1); a US patent/US application publication effectively filed before 2015-09-02 is additionally available under §102(a)(2) even if it published later. Note reference #13 published 2016-11-03 — after both the critical date and this application's filing date — so it can only be §102(a)(2) art (its 2015-01-13 priority precedes the critical date), and only as to subject matter actually supported in its earlier-filed disclosure.

Two of the thirteen are applicant-admitted prior art on the face of the specification: the Background identifies "Patent Literature 1: JP-A-2006-510035" (= #4/#2/#3 family) and "Patent Literature 2: JP-B2-3756969" (= #1). That admission is itself citable and cannot be retracted by the patentee.

Reference-by-reference §102 assessment

Tier 1 — the only references with genuine §102 surface

#1 — JP 3756969 B2 (T&D Corp.), "Measuring unit," pub. 2006-03-22 (admitted as Patent Literature 2)
This is the closest reference to the core idea of the patent: a small, hermetically sealed measurement unit holding a sensor element and a memory storing the sensor's data, with a non-contact optical (light) interface used to extract the stored data, expressly to avoid a connector penetrating the housing and thereby preserve a sealed/weatherproof enclosure. Its stated problem — that ambient light (illumination, sunlight) striking the receive element causes current drain and shortens battery life in standby — is a channel-quality/optical-noise concern closely adjacent to the patent's "disturbance" discussion.
§102 mapping: potentially anticipates only a hypothetical broad claim to "a sealable physical-quantity measuring unit comprising a housing, a sensor element, a memory, and a non-contact optical interface on the housing." It does not anticipate claim 1 or claim 4: no electronic circuit unit receiving the detector signal in the claimed sense; no electronic calibration unit; no first control unit controlling an external signal; no signal transmission unit electrically connected to a first control unit; and critically no detachably attachable communication attachment member with (a) a cover disposed so a second light emitter/receiver faces a window and (b) an engagement portion engageable with the housing, and no recess-in-cover / cylindrical-portion mating. It is not merely an "expressly different" reference — it is a data-download system, not a calibration system, which is the hinge of every independent claim. No anticipation of any of claims 1–6.

#2 / #3 / #4 — the Dresser→Ashcroft family: US 2004/0113813 A1 (2004-06-17, pub. of US 7,140,257 B2), WO 2004/053450 A1 (2004-06-24), JP 2006-510035 A (2006-03-23) (US 2004/0113813 A1 flagged as examiner-cited)
One family, one disclosure: a pressure measurement device with a housing/inlet, a transducer (Bourdon-tube/eddy-current or piezo-resistive), a processor, and a data communication device transmitting wireless signals — with an IrDA (infrared) interface coupled to the processor such that the processor "may be remotely programmed via the interface," including setting a full-scale pressure value and a zero. That is the single best pre-2015 disclosure of the "remotely (infra)red-calibrate a pressure measuring device" concept, which is exactly the patent's stated problem (ii) and half of its stated solution.
§102 mapping: potentially anticipates a bare claim to "remote wireless/IR programming or zero/full-scale setting of a pressure measurement device." It does not anticipate claim 1 or claim 4: (i) no hermetically provided window in a plate — the IrDA port is an external free-space interface of the programmer, not a sealed, plate-mounted window forming part of a housing seal; (ii) no detachable communication attachment member with a cover facing the window plus an engagement portion engageable with the housing; (iii) no recess engaging a cylindrical portion of the plate (claims 1, 6); (iv) no cord connected between a controller body and an attachment member, no detachable cord, no third light emitter/receiver in a controller body (claim 4). No anticipation of claims 1–6. This family is, however, the strongest §103 combination anchor on the "IR calibration of a pressure device" side, and it is admitted prior art (#4).

Tier 2 — examiner-cited US publications whose verified content does not reach the claims

#11 — US 2012/0079884 A1 (Rosemount Inc.), pub. 2012-04-05 — a process transmitter with a high-static-pressure isolation diaphragm coupling; architecture/diaphragm subject matter. Nothing on optical calibration coupling, windows, attachment covers, or engagement structures. Does not anticipate any of claims 1–6. Its likely role was as secondary art on transmitter-housing/sensor-coupling structure.

#10 — US 2015/0157791 A1 (Deka Products LP), pub. 2015-06-11 — syringe pump with a pressure sensor assembly. Published only ~3 months before the critical date; §102(a)(1). Nothing in the title/retrieved abstract reaches a hermetically-sealed optical calibration window, a snap-on communication attachment, or a controller with a third light emitter/receiver. Does not anticipate any of claims 1–6.

#13 — US 2016/0322831 A1 (Fluke Corp.), pub. 2016-11-03 — power source system with multiple electrical outputs. §102(a)(2)-only reference (effectively filed 2015-01-13; published after the critical date). Power-supply architecture; no calibration-link, window, or attachment structure. Does not anticipate any of claims 1–6.

Tier 3 — verified but plainly remote

#5 — US 2005/0109116 A1 (Kurtz / Kulite), pub. 2005-05-26 — a pressure transducer with a piezoresistive bridge, an A/D or amplifier, and a transmitter selectable among "radio frequency, Blue Tooth, … infrared"; the invention's point is a battery-energizing push-button switch actuated when the transducer is screwed into a pressure port. I verified this content directly. §102: no calibration unit, no sealed optical window, no detachable attachment member/cover/engagement portion, no plate-cylindrical-portion/recess. Does not anticipate any of claims 1–6.

#7 / #8 — US 2009/0120195 A1 (Willcox / Rosemount, pub. 2009-05-14) and its JP counterpart JP 2011-503576 A (pub. 2011-01-27) — an oil-less differential-pressure transmitter; a loop communicator that "may be… a wireless transceiver," with "infrared communications techniques" merely recited in a long list of optional wireless protocols, plus HART/FOUNDATION Fieldbus/WirelessHART. §102: listing IR as one of many optional transceiver types is not a disclosure of the claimed sealed window, the optical coupling attachment, or the calibration control path. Does not anticipate any of claims 1–6.

Tier 4 — references I could not verify in this session (flagged, not characterized)

For these three I retrieved only the citation-table entries (number, dates, patentee, title). I am not going to describe their disclosures, because I did not read them, and per the standing rule I will not fabricate content:

• #6 — EP 1850096 A1 (WIKA Alexander Wiegand GmbH & Co. KG), "Remote transmitter for analogue measuring devices," pub. 2007-10-31. Title suggests a retrofit remote-reading transmitter for analog gauges — plausibly a mountable housing carrying a sensor/transmitter that attaches to a gauge body, which is why the EPO searcher listed it. Disclosure unverified here; §102 effect unasserted.
• #9 — JP 2009-166752 A (Seiko Epson Corp.), "Pressure detection device and information display system," pub. 2009-07-30. Unverified.
• #12 — JP 2013-250148 A (Nippon Seiki Co., Ltd.), "Pressure detection device," pub. 2013-12-12. Unverified.

If any of these three matters to you, they need to be pulled and read in full (JPO J-PlatPat / ESPACENET machine translation) before any §102 conclusion is drawn on them.

Bottom line

No reference in the 13-document citation record anticipates any of claims 1–6 of US 10,175,134 B2. Every independent claim (1 and 4) requires an interlocking structural combination that none of the cited references discloses, alone or in the record as I verified it:

1. a window hermetically provided to the plate and forming part of the sealed housing,
2. all of the electronic circuit unit, electronic calibration unit, first control unit, signal transmission unit, and first light emitter/receiver inside the housing, and
3. a detachably attachable communication attachment member comprising a cover disposed so the second light emitter/receiver faces the window and an engagement portion engageable with the housing — with claim 1/6 additionally requiring the cover recess contacting the outer circumference of the plate's cylindrical portion.

• The closest §102 reference on the optical-interface-through-a-sealed-housing axis is JP 3756969 B2 (a data-download temperature unit, not a calibration system), and on the IR-calibration-of-a-pressure-device axis the Dresser/Ashcroft family (US 2004/0113813 A1 / WO 2004/053450 A1 / JP 2006-510035 A) — both of which are applicant-admitted prior art.
• The two independent claims are therefore properly supported against §102; the realistic validity exposure is §103 — i.e., whether JP 3756969 B2 (sealed optical data interface) + the Dresser/Ashcroft family (IR programming/zeroing of a pressure device) + an ordinary-skill mechanical attachment/alignment expedient would have rendered the cover/engagement-portion/recess alignment structure obvious. The patentee's own argument would rest on the unexpected combination of a detachable optically-aligned coupler with a hermetic plate window, and on the pulse-count signal checker (claim 2) as a non-analogous alternative to IrDA ambient-light mitigation.

Verification gaps to close before relying on this:

• Confirm the citation set against the actual USPTO file wrapper (PatentCenter for 15/252,703) — the Google Patents star-flagging reproduced above should not be treated as a substitute for the examiner's actual PTO-892/1449 and rejection record.
• Read EP 1850096 A1, JP 2009-166752 A, and JP 2013-250148 A in full.
• The examiner/third-party attribution of the four flagged US publications, and the assignee field for US 2004/0113813 A1 (listed as "Henson John W." rather than an assignee — the granted US 7,140,257 B2 lists Ashcroft Inc.), are aggregator-field artifacts worth correcting against the official record.
• The three "Families Citing this family" entries (WO 2016/028047 A1; JP 6564358 B2; JP 6931343 B2) and the "Similar Documents" list are later documents that cite this patent — they are not prior art to it and must not be cited as such.

I'll ground this analysis in the actual prior-art references listed on the patent's page. Let me pull details on the key ones.

Good detail on the core optical-communication references. Let me pull the remaining cited references.

Obviousness Analysis — U.S. Patent No. 10,175,134 B2

"Physical quantity measuring device" under 35 U.S.C. § 103

Analysis date: 2026-09-30 · Effective filing date for prior-art purposes: 2015-09-02 (JP 2015-172563 priority)
Governing statute: AIA § 102/§ 103 (application filed 2016-08-31, i.e., after 2013-03-16)
Sources used: the "Citations (13)" and "Non-Patent Citations (2)" lists on the patent's Google Patents page, plus verification lookups of the individual references (URLs below).

Methodological note / scope limit. The Google Patents page lists the cited references but does not reproduce the examiner's citation categories (X / Y / A) or the EPO search-report relevance coding. I therefore do not know which references the examiner treated as most material. The two non-patent citations on the page — a European Search Report dated 2017-01-31 and a Japanese Office Action dated 2018-04-17 — are the actual examination record but their contents were not retrievable. Everything below is my independent § 103 mapping. Where I could not retrieve a reference's substantive text within my search budget, I say so explicitly rather than guessing.

1. Legal framework applied

AIA § 103 asks whether the claimed subject matter as a whole would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art (PHOSITA) at the effective filing date, considering the Graham v. John Deere factors: (i) scope and content of the prior art; (ii) differences between the prior art and the claims; (iii) level of ordinary skill; and (iv) secondary considerations. Under KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007), a combination is obvious not only when the references explicitly teach or suggest the combination, but also when it would have been "obvious to try," when the combination is "a combination of familiar elements according to known methods [yielding] predictable results," or when the improvement is the use of "a known technique … to improve similar devices in the same way." A KSR rational articulation (e.g., design incentive, design need, market forces, finite number of identified predictable solutions) suffices; an express "motivation" sentence in the references is not required.

Level of ordinary skill in the art (proposed)

A PHOSITA here would be a mechanical/electrical engineer with ~2–4 years of experience in the design of industrial field instruments (pressure/temperature transmitters, gauges, transducers), including (a) sealed-housing construction and ingress protection (IP/NEMA) and (b) short-range data communication between a handheld tool and a field device (IrDA/optical or RF). This is a routine, low-innovation field; the specification itself describes the invention in terms of well-known building blocks (strain-gauge sensor module, circuit board, IrDA-type transceiver, handheld controller). The relatively low level of skill cuts toward obviousness.

Analogous art: All references below are from the same field of endeavor (measuring devices / field instruments and their communication interfaces) or are reasonably pertinent to the problem of communicating with a sealed instrument. They are analogous art.

2. Claim element decomposition (claim 1)

Claims 2–6 add: (2) a signal checker + infrared link; (3) controller body + cord; (4) independent claim adding detachable cord + a third transceiver in the controller body; (5) connection pin surrounded by the cylindrical portion + engagement piece gripping the cylindrical case; (6) mirrors 5 for the claim-4 system.

Observation: Elements 1.1–1.8 and 1.9–1.11 are recognizable, predictable sub-systems of a field instrument and its handheld tool. The only elements that could even arguably carry weight are 1.12 (hermetic window), 1.14 (aligning cover/engagement portion), and 1.15/1.16 (cylindrical-portion/recess datum). As shown below, each of those is squarely met by the cited art.

3. What the cited references actually disclose

R1 — US 2004/0113813 A1 (Henson et al.), publ. 2004-06-17; granted as US 7,140,257 B2, Ashcroft Inc.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US20040113813 · https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/8f/8e/5b/0c7dc79ad2ce4a/US7140257.pdf

This is the same family as the specification's own Patent Literature 1 (WO 2004/053450 A1 / JP-A-2006-510035, Dresser, Inc. — both listed among the cited references). R1 discloses a pressure measurement device comprising a housing with an inlet, a transducer (Bourdon tube + inductive/eddy-current sensor; or piezo-resistive) generating an electrical signal representative of pressure, and a data communication device that transmits a wireless signal corresponding to the electrical signal. It includes a processor that generates pressure characterization data and compensates for non-linearity and temperature coefficients.

Critically for § 103, R1 discloses:

• "Particular implementations may include an Infrared Data Association interface coupled to the processor, wherein the processor may be remotely programmed via the interface."
• "The processor may be programmed to change pressure data set points."
• Its utility discussion refers to entering "a full-scale pressure value" and "a zero" into the device — i.e., span and zero calibration over the infrared interface.
• A display, function keys, and a transceiver on/off switch on the device.

What R1 supplies: 1.1–1.8 (housing, transducer at the fluid inlet, processor/circuitry, and a light-based (IR) transceiver remote-programming interface through which the instrument is calibrated — i.e., the electronic calibration function reached via an optical link) and 1.9–1.11 in functional terms (an external programming device talking to the instrument).

What R1 does not expressly supply: a hermetically sealed window in a plate, and the detachable cover/engagement-portion/datum mechanical structure of 1.12, 1.14–1.16.

R2 — JP 3756969 B2 (assignee: 株式会社ティアンドデイ / T&D Corp.), a.k.a. the specification's Patent Literature 2

https://patents.google.com/patent/JP3756969B2/en

A measuring unit having a sealed housing that internally houses a sensor element (e.g., a thermistor) and a memory storing its data, with an interface on the surface of the housing. R2 discloses that the interface uses optical communication — a light-emitting element (light transmitter) and a light-receiving element (photodiode/phototransistor) for contactless readout — and explicitly frames the entire construction around the waterproof/dustproof (耐候性) problem:

• The background section states that to retrieve data from the memory a transmission cable/connector must be attached, and that providing a pin-type connector on the housing makes a fully sealed structure difficult, creating waterproof/dustproof problems; adding covers or packing to the connector complicates the structure, enlarges the unit, and raises cost (this is essentially the '134 patent's own stated problem).
• It expressly proposes replacing the connector with a contactless, e.g., optical-communication, interface so the device can be sealed, and describes bringing a communication unit into proximity with the measuring unit to perform optical communication.
• It further recognizes the ambient-light problem — stray light (illumination/sunlight) reaching the photodetector causes current drain and shortens battery life — motivating controlled/verified link conditions.

What R2 supplies: 1.8/1.10 (paired light emitter/receiver for optical communication), and above all the motivation and teaching to place the optical interface at a sealed surface of the housing (1.12) so the housing remains waterproof without a connector — plus the concept of an external communication unit brought into proximity of that interface.

What R2 does not supply: pressure/fluid detection, an electronic calibration unit, or any cover/engagement/datum geometry.

R3 — EP 1 850 096 A1 / B1 (WIKA Alexander Wiegand GmbH & Co. KG), 2007-10-31; family member WO 2007/122018 A1

https://patents.google.com/patent/EP1850096B1/de · http://data.epo.org/publication-server/rest/v1.2/patents/EP1850096NWA1/document.pdf

A remote transmitter for analogue gauges (manometers/thermometers). The electronics (an ASIC with a Hall sensor) are mounted on the viewing glass (Sichtscheibe / display glass) that is installable on the gauge, and terminals for power and signal are led out through the glass. It teaches locating optoelectronic/electronic components at the transparent plate of a gauge housing and passing signals through/at that plate, and notes the gauge may be a pressure gauge or thermometer.

What R3 supplies: context for element 1.2/1.12 — a gauge housing's face plate/glass as the location for electronics and a signal interface; supports the placement choice.

R4 — US 2009/0120195 A1 (Willcox, Rosemount Inc.), 2009-05-14; granted as US 7,779,698 B2

https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/patents/patent/US-20090120195-A1

A pressure transmitter with a pressure sensor, measurement circuitry (A/D), a controller, and a loop communicator that "may be, or include, a wireless transceiver … [using] infrared communications techniques," among other wireless technologies ("free optics," RF, WirelessHART, etc.). Its FIG. 2 architecture (power module → controller → measurement circuitry → sensor; loop communicator ↔ controller) is a textbook field-transmitter architecture.

What R4 supplies: corroboration that a pressure transmitter with internal measurement circuitry and infrared/free-optics communication was known, and that routing both measurement data and configuration traffic through a communication block coupled to a controller was conventional.

R5 — US 2005/0109116 A1 (Kurtz, Kulite), 2005-05-26

Title: "Transducer with integral switch for wireless electronics." I could not retrieve substantive text within the search budget. From the title/assignee I infer (low confidence) it teaches integrating wireless-communication electronics and a control switch into a transducer housing — relevant to 1.13 but not to 1.12/1.14/1.15–1.16. I flag this as unverified.

R6 — US 2012/0079884 A1 (Rosemount Inc.), 2012-04-05

"Industrial process transmitter with high static pressure isolation diaphragm coupling." A mechanical/structural pressure-transmitter reference. Relevantly, it shows the conventional arrangement of a pressure-transmitter housing with respect to a sensor and process connections. Low direct relevance to the optical/coupling claims. Not verified in detail.

R7 — US 2016/0322831 A1 (Fluke Corp.), 2016-11-03 (priority 2015-01-13)

https://patents.google.com/patent/US20160322831A1/en

"Power source system with multiple electrical outputs." This is about a current-clamp power distribution system for test/measurement devices in electrical equipment areas. It mentions testing devices that measure parameters (including pressure, temperature, humidity) and communication circuitry that communicates with a testing device and receives data, and that can communicate with a remote computing device. Of marginal relevance to the '134 claims; it does not teach an optical window, a calibration unit, or a detachable optical coupling. Because its effective filing date (2015-01-13) precedes 2015-09-02, it is at least 102(a)(2)-eligible, but it contributes little to the obviousness case beyond generic "field device + remote communication" context.

R8–R10 — JP 2009-166752 A (Seiko Epson, "Pressure detection device and information display system"); JP 2013-250148 A (Nippon Seiki, "Pressure detection device"); US 2015/0157791 A1 (Deka Products, "Syringe Pump Having A Pressure Sensor Assembly"); US 2003/… n/a; JP 3756969 already covered.

I could not retrieve substantive text for the Seiko Epson, Nippon Seiki, and Deka references within the search budget. Based on titles/assignees they are general pressure-detection / sensor-assembly art of low-to-moderate relevance. I flag them as unverified.

Similar-document confirmations (not in the citation list)

The patent page's "Similar Documents" includes US 2006/0254911 A1 ("Gas sensor module with contactless interface"), US 2006/0191318 A1 ("Digitally accessible sensor"), US 7,132,659 B2 ("Sensor having a communication device"). These are not part of the examiner's citation list, so I do not rely on them, but they independently corroborate that contactless/optical interfaces to sealed sensors were a well-developed art by the mid-2000s.

4. The obviousness case

4.1 Primary combination for Claim 1 — R1 (Henson) in view of R2 (JP 3756969), optionally further with R3 (WIKA) and R4 (Willcox)

Claim 1 read on the combination:

• 1.1–1.3 — R1: housing with a stem/inlet; transducer generating a signal representative of pressure of a fluid at the inlet. (R4: same, in the classic transmitter form factor.)
• 1.4 — R1's processor/measurement circuitry receiving the transducer signal; R4's measurement circuitry/A-D.
• 1.5–1.6 — R1's processor, remotely programmable over the IrDA interface (zero and full-scale set-points) — i.e., the calibration control path; R2's transmitter/receiver pair similarly interfaces with the unit's control electronics.
• 1.7–1.8 — R1's IrDA interface/transceiver coupled to the processor constitutes the signal transmission unit with a light emitter/receiver.
• 1.9–1.11 — R1's external programming device/software utility (and R2's "communication unit brought into proximity") reads on the detachable communication attachment member bearing a second light emitter/receiver and a second controller.
• 1.12 — R2: a contactless optical interface at the sealed housing surface — motivated expressly to keep the housing hermetically sealed without a connector. Placing the window specifically in the end plate (1.2) is the natural design location (the plate is the access face; R3 in fact mounts optoelectronics on the gauge's glass face and routes signals through it).
• 1.13 — R1/R4: the measurement and communication electronics are housed inside the instrument housing. R2: the sensor and memory are in a sealed housing.
• 1.14 — an external communication/attachment head carrying the second optical element, positioned facing the window, with a mechanical engagement to hold position.
• 1.15–1.16 — cylindrical portion on the plate and recess in the cover contacting it: routine mechanical datum. See §4.3 below.

KSR rationales for combining R1 + R2:

1. Same field, same problem, same solution type. Both address communicating with a sealed field measuring instrument. R1 solves the remote-programming/calibration problem via IR; R2 solves the waterproofing problem by replacing a hard connector with an optical interface at the sealed housing. Combining them is the predictable, conventional union of two known techniques ("use of a known technique to improve similar devices in the same way" — KSR).
2. Express motivation in R2. R2 explicitly identifies the connector/waterproofing tradeoff and states the objective of a simply structured, highly weather-resistant, small unit. A PHOSITA seeking to make R1's IR-programmable transmitter waterproof would be led directly to R2's sealed optical window.
3. Design need / market forces. Field instruments (pressure/temperature gauges) must pass ingress-protection requirements. Sealing the optical path with a window is the obvious way to get both an optical interface and a watertight enclosure.
4. Reasonable expectation of success. Both are optical links at standard IR wavelengths; no unpredictable technology is required.

4.2 Claim 2 — signal checker + infrared

Supported by R1 (the link is IrDA/infrared) plus R2, which expressly recognizes that stray ambient light reaching the photodetector corrupts/consumes the link and drains the battery — supplying the motivation to verify that the optical link is actually working before relying on it. Confirming link integrity by transmitting known pulses (e.g., a blink pattern) and counting received pulses is a routine, well-known data-link quality check, and the specification itself concedes that checking communication by error analysis (checksum/parity) was already conventional. Claim 2 is a predictable embellishment: R1 + R2 + ordinary skill (or R4, which discloses field-transmitter loop-communicator diagnostics), and it is rendered obvious.

4.3 Claims 1/5 — the mechanical datum features (cylindrical portion, recess, engagement piece)

Once one accepts the combination of §4.1, the remaining features (1.14–1.16; claim 5's connection pin surrounded by the cylindrical portion and the engagement piece gripping the cylindrical case) are conventional mechanical expedients:

• Motivation: the artisan must (a) fix the relative position of the two optical elements so the beam path is stable and ambient light is excluded (the classic reason for a mechanical coupling between an optical head and a port), (b) allow single-handed field use, and (c) protect and use the instrument's existing connector boss. The natural, cheapest solution is to use the instrument's existing geometry as alignment datums.
• R1's device and pressure transmitters generally (e.g., R6's field-transmitter packaging) have a shrouded electrical connector boss on the end plate (a cylindrical collar surrounding the terminals) — exactly the "cylindrical portion" of element 1.15. Forming the coupling cover with a mating recess that seats over that collar (1.16), and engagement pieces that clip over the cylindrical case (claim 5), is the kind of "familiar element[] according to known methods" that KSR holds obvious. Snap-fit/bayonet covers, split collar clamps, and plug-on optical heads are ubiquitous.
• R2 already teaches bringing an external communication unit into a controlled proximity with the sealed optical interface; a snap-on cover is an obvious way to achieve and hold that proximity.

I would expect these limitations to fall to R1 + R2 + ordinary mechanical skill, and, on the datum aspect, to R3 (component-locating structure on a gauge's plate/glass).

4.4 Claims 3 and 4 — controller body / cord / detachable cord / third transceiver

• Claim 3 (controller body + cord): Placing the "second controller" in a handheld body tethered by a cord to the optical head is a purely conventional packaging choice (IrDA dongles, barcode readers, and remote read/write heads all use tethered heads). Motivation: let the operator hold/settle the display while the head stays aligned at the gauge — the same advantage the '134 specification asserts. Obvious over R1 + R2 with ordinary skill.
• Claim 4 (cord detachable, and a third light emitter/receiver in the controller body): This is duplication of a known element (the second transceiver) into the controller body plus a detachable connector — both routine. Motivation: when the gauge is directly accessible, point the controller body straight at the window and skip the coupling head; when it is remote, tether the head. This is a "finite number of identified, predictable solutions" design choice (KSR). No new principle is required; the transceiver in the body is identical in function to the one in the attachment member. Obvious over R1 + R2; R2's teaching of an external communication unit brought into proximity supports direct body-to-gauge communication.
• Claims 5 and 6 — see §4.3 and §4.1/§4.2 respectively; claim 6's added features (pin, cylindrical portion, recess, engagement piece) are the same conventional mechanical elements applied to the claim-4 system, and are obvious for the same reasons.

4.5 Independent-claim summary

5. Secondary considerations / rebuttal exposure

• No secondary-consideration evidence of record. The earlier litigation search for this patent returned no litigation, no PTAB proceeding, and no license/commercial-success record, so there is presently no evidence of unexpected results, commercial success, long-felt but unmet need, failure of others, or copying. Absent such evidence, the Graham factor (iv) does not rebut the prima facie case.
• Nexus weakness. The specification asserts a long-felt need ("a screwdriver-operated trimmer makes calibration troublesome and forces a complicated waterproof structure"). But R2 (JP 3756969) already articulates the identical problem and the identical solution (drop the connector for a contactless optical interface to preserve the seal), and R1 already solves the calibration side (IR-programmable zero/span). When the references themselves recognize and address the same problem, the "long-felt need" is largely neutralized.
• Anticipation of the § 103/§ 112 tension: the applicant's own characterization of the invention ("the setting … can be easily done using the controller without using a tool") is an advantage of the combination, i.e., the predictable result of KSR-style combination, not a patentable difference.

6. Where a non-obviousness argument could survive (candor section)

To be balanced, the strongest counterargument the patent owner could make is structural: the cited references do not, on their faces, disclose (i) a hermetically sealed window in the plate of a cylindrical pressure-gauge case, or (ii) a detachable communication attachment member with a cover + engagement portion that engages the housing and a recess that seats on the plate's cylindrical portion. R2's interface is described generically "on the surface of the housing," and R1's IrDA interface is not described as hermetic-window-in-a-plate. So a holding-specific challenge would have to rely on:

• R3 (WIKA) for locating optoelectronics at the gauge's glass plate with signal feedthrough; and
• ordinary mechanical skill / general knowledge for the snap-on coupling geometry.

If the tribunal credited the patent owner's argument that the particular windowed-plate + snap-on datum combination is non-conventional, claims 1/5 (and their counterparts 4/6) could survive on that narrow structural point. But given how conventional shrouded connector bosses, snap-fit covers, and optical-head alignment couplings are, I assess that argument as weak — this is the kind of "arrangement of old elements with each performing the same function it had been known to perform" that § 103 condemns. My honest estimate: claims 1–6 are more likely than not invalid under § 103, with the highest confidence against claims 2 and 3 and the lowest (but still >50%) against claims 1/5 if the mechanical-datum argument were pressed.

7. Confidence, caveats, and what I could not verify

1. Reference categories unknown. The page lists citations without examiner X/Y/A codes; the EPO Search Report and JPO Office Action (the two Non-Patent Citations) were not retrievable. I cannot state which references the examiner actually relied upon.
2. Unverified references. I could not retrieve substantive text for US 2005/0109116 A1 (Kurtz), US 2012/0079884 A1 (Rosemount), JP 2009-166752 A (Seiko Epson), JP 2013-250148 A (Nippon Seiki), or US 2015/0157791 A1 (Deka) within my search budget. My characterizations of these are based on titles/assignees and are marked low confidence. They are not load-bearing for the analysis above; the case rests on R1 (Henson/US 7,140,257), R2 (JP 3756969), R3 (WIKA/EP 1850096), and R4 (Willcox/US 2009/0120195), all of which I retrieved.
3. R1 is the same family as the specification's Patent Literature 1. The specification cites JP-A-2006-510035 (Dresser) and US 2005/0046404-family / WO 2004/053450 — Henson's US 2004/0113813 (Ashcroft/Dresser) is the U.S. published counterpart. I have treated them as one teaching; if the patent owner tried to distinguish on family/assignee grounds, that would not change the disclosure.
4. R2 is the specification's Patent Literature 2 (JP-B2-3756969). Its express waterproofing motivation is the most damaging single fact in the record, because it makes the "hermetic window instead of a connector" choice expressly reason-driven, not merely obvious-to-try.
5. Dates. All cited references predate the 2015-09-02 priority date except US 2016/0322831 A1 (Fluke), whose publication (2016-11-03) postdates it but whose effective filing (2015-01-13) precedes it; it is at best marginally relevant and I do not rely on it.
6. Subsequent Nagano Keiki filings shown under "Families Citing this family" (JP 6564358 B2, JP 6931343 B2) postdate the priority date and are not prior art; they are noted only to show the assignee's continued prosecution in this space.

Bottom line: On the cited record, U.S. 10,175,134 would have been prima facie obvious under § 103. The single most efficient combination is Henson (US 2004/0113813 / US 7,140,257) in view of JP 3756969 B2, with WIKA EP 1 850 096 and Willcox US 2009/0120195 available as secondary references for the window-at-the-plate placement and the pressure-transmitter + infrared-communication context. Claims 2, 3, and 4 are the easiest to invalidate; claims 1, 5, and 6 depend on the mechanical datum features, which I assess as obvious but which present the only genuinely contestable ground.