Pure craftsmanship in control engineering
Your installation has been running for years, but the hardware is being phased out and the documentation no longer matches. We read out what is actually in the control system, document it and migrate it to a platform that will last for years again.
For machine builders without their own controls department and process plants with an ageing installed base.
Migration paths
Siemens S7 and TIA PortalSigmatek LASALDeltaVS7-1500 F/HLOGO!STM32PROFINETModbusCANMQTT
Services
Process, machine and embedded in one team. That lets us get to the bottom of a control system from the I/O to the firmware, even when nobody has that knowledge anymore.
A sensible migration starts with understanding what the installation does, not with the hardware. We migrate S7 programs to current TIA Portal versions, and process control systems such as ProVOX and RS3 to DeltaV. If documentation is missing, we reconstruct it with our own tooling: block inventory, call tree, I/O map and functional description.
Building new control systems or extending existing ones: PLC and HMI software for machines and process plants, including functional safety on S7-1500 F/H. And we commission on site ourselves, onshore and offshore.
Custom electronics and firmware where a standard PLC falls short: PCB design in KiCad, repair and modification of existing hardware, STM32 and CAN. And making the data from your machines accessible through MQTT, InfluxDB and Node-RED.
Cases
Four examples of how we work: from migration to circuit board, all under one roof.
Greenhouse horticulture · Siemens to Sigmatek migration
A dosing system that dilutes a product with water to the right concentration and pumps the spray liquid under pressure to the spray computers on the greenhouse roof. The control system moved from a Siemens S7-1200 with Weintek HMI to Sigmatek, so the drives share a common DC bus and a smaller generator will do. We read out the entire existing program, captured it in a platform-independent functional design and rebuilt the control system on that basis in LASAL. Everything was tested in simulation first; commissioning on the machine is under way.
Legacy · reverse engineering, migration prepared
An old S7-200 control system whose supplier no longer existed: the PLC itself was faulty, the program could not be exported and the documentation was gone. We first repaired the controller, then retrieved the program from the PLC and secured it as an STL listing, ready for migration to an S7-1200 in TIA Portal. A few unknowns only surfaced thanks to our years in machine building and the maritime sector, and our knowledge of the underlying electrical, mechanical and hydraulic engineering: it is not about the software alone, but about understanding the machine.
Test systems · migration, from board to dashboard
A test system with 30 pressure-controlled test tubes in racks of five. The old system ran on an outdated board driven through the parallel port of a Windows PC; when that port became obsolete, migration was necessary. We helped design and test the new controller board and built the complete software stack: firmware for the STM32 controllers with a CAN bootloader, the S7 PLC program, a C# operator application, a Python gateway and the data layer with InfluxDB and Grafana. Delivered with calibration against a reference instrument and a SAT protocol.
Greenhouse horticulture · own product, from chip to cloud
Our own product. The spray computer controls a machine that applies a shading coating evenly to the greenhouse roof, for climate control of the crop. It reads the motor encoder, the flow meter and a pressure sensor, calculates speed, flow rate and dosage per hectare and passes them to the pump control through MQTT and Modbus TCP. We designed the PCB in KiCad through to the production package, wrote the firmware on an STM32 with our own bootloader, and built the web application that rolls out firmware updates remotely.
We do not name our clients. We are happy to give references in a conversation.
Getting started
Before anything is rebuilt, we map out what is there. Two weeks, with a report you can use without us.
Lead time 2 weeksWork on site and remote
Contact
A short description is enough: make and type of control system, what is going on and when. Use the form or email us.