Who we are and how we work

The whole board seen square on: one incomer feeding a copper busbar, twelve ways dropping away from it, three of them carrying current the full drop and nine stopping a few centimetres below the bar. — Twelve ways leave the bar. Three of them are measured.

01 / 04

What we do

We survey the plant, specify what goes in the board, fit it, set it running, and build the software it reports into. The person who answers your call is one of the people who built it.

That is both halves of one job, and most companies do one of them. Switchgear people do not write software. Software people have never opened a live board. Doing both is why a reading arrives already knowing where in your building it came from, instead of being matched up afterwards against a list of meter numbers.

It was built here, for plants here. We run the same day you run — the grid when there is grid, a generator for the rest of it, solar while the roof is earning. Nothing on this site was designed for a country with one reliable supply and then translated.

02 / 04

What that takes

Inside the board: Reading a plant from its panels: which way feeds what, where a sensor can close around a cable without cutting it, and what has to stay live while we work.
Getting old equipment to talk: Most of a working plant is equipment nobody sells any more. We read it on whatever it already speaks, and where a machine is unusual, its own manual is enough for us to read it.
The software above it: Everything you look at — the live screens, the alerts, the reports that land in your inbox — is ours, so a thing you ask for is a change we can make rather than a request we pass on.
Staying up when the power does not: The intelligence sits in your plant, not in a data centre. When the internet drops the line keeps being measured, and when the mains go and the generator picks up, the count follows the source.

03 / 04

Why we bother

Industry 4.0 should be understandable, accessible and useful. Most of what is written about it is none of those, and a plant owner who has been sold a dashboard twice is right to be sceptical the third time.

So the work is in two halves that feed each other. We implement — surveys, panels, integration, software that runs on real sites. And we teach: demonstrations and workshops that let somebody follow a signal from a machine to a decision and see there is no magic in it.

The platform is built on open-source foundations, as almost everything is. We are grateful for that work and we do not claim it as ours.

04 / 04

How we work

We would rather walk your switchroom for an afternoon than guess at a price and revise it later.

We do not print a percentage we cannot stand behind. Where a figure on this site came from somebody else's document, the document is named and linked; where two official sources disagree, both are shown rather than the flattering one.

When something we published turns out to be wrong, it gets corrected and the correction says what changed. That is a low bar, and it is worth saying out loud because so much of this industry does not clear it.

The same board from eye level, looking down the row: the busbar running away into the dark, current transformers clamped on two of the near conductors, the rest unmetered.