Industry 4.0

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is often considered only a buzzword. However, in principle, the growth of compact embedded systems (based on ARM processor architecture) leads to a better distribution of the factory tasks. It is extremely helpful in many industrial segments, e.g., energy production and distribution, agriculture and food industries, and facility maintenance. 

We see the term ‘Industry 4.0’ (also called the Fourth Industrial Revolution) as a transition from the isle-oriented industry computers to the system of smart interconnected devices. These devices also empower trends like Cognitive computing, the Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Cyber-physical systems (CPS).

The increasing operational efficiency is achieved by interconnection, information transparency, technical assistance, and decentralized decisions.

We are enthusiastic about finding new ways and trends.

Our hardware design engineers have a solid theoretical and practical background in debugging hardware interfaces and their integration with appropriate software / firmware counterparts.  

Our software development engineers appreciate the latest trends in IoT.

Our engineers are familiar with both old-fashioned and modern communication protocols and data formats. Our system architects have deep experience in predicting the performance from specific platforms. The complete team can make proof of concept to test the feasibility and performance of each newly planned system component.

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Beginnings of Industry 4.0 are marked by the words ‘complicated’ and ‘expensive’.

We have been participating in solving production issues since 2004. It started with participating in developing a few RF (Radio Frequency) products. At that time, the production lines were controlled and monitored by complicated and expensive computers based on Intel x86 architecture. 

Our first test setup was also built on such a platform. This platform interconnects test fixtures with standard bench-top measurement instruments through USB and GPIB interfaces. Test report sharing was relatively simple, and post-processing analysis was not very straightforward.  

Our evolution is moving towards features such as smaller, faster, and simpler.

As time passed, we started using the embedded systems based on ARM architecture. We continued making our test systems smaller and easily interconnectable through LAN and Wifi. 

We have learned new communication protocols to make monitoring and control more manageable and faster. We implement test scripts (often written in Python or other scripting languages) where appropriate.

We have experience with lightweight SQL database engines, which can even run on ARMv8 devices and be accessed via HTTPS, MQTT, or other protocols.

Our team also have deep expertise in DSP, which allows us to implement cognitive computing techniques as well.