Projects and Customers

I've gotten some questions of late on what types of projects GSDware has been working on for its customers. While we're somewhat constrained via non-disclosure agreements, we can still paint some broad strokes to give some insight into our business.

On Site Manufacturing Engineering:

We've been on the manufacturing floor of multiple major manufacturers and equipment vendors in the past 2 years. In some cases, we have also been tapped to act as a representative of our customers’ company rather than represent GSDware. Our customers trust us to make a good impression, and we've delivered on that trust.

Mobile Applications:

In the past 2 years, we've developed 4 mobile applications. Of those 4 apps, 3 were written in Xamarin for a New York based startup.

Xamarin is a C# .NET mobile development framework that provides a great mix of native performance with a shared codebase. We've upped our Xamarin game through the use of XAML pages as the IDE has improved to support them. Faster page design means faster app development.

Structured Text PLC Programming:

We work with a semiconductor equipment vendor who needs to improve the IQ of their equipment. By adding a PLC to their tool design, we've been able to implement additional features such as real time statistical based alarms and Modbus TCP/IP connectivity. All this while decreasing the cost of the equipment BOM.

Structured text PLC programming is becoming more widely accepted within the automation community. It offers some great advantages over traditional ladder logic. GSDware has the software experience to leverage those advantages.

Large Scale .NET and SQL Development:

Multiple manufacturing customers have entrusted us with development of complex .NET projects that use SQL Server as a backend data store. These projects have been mission critical for our customers. The choice between C#.NET and VB.NET is entirely up to the customer - We're comfortable in either language.

Our development model focuses heavily on an iterative approach, offering deliverables early in the project timeline. We've had the benefit of customers with a clear vision who can trust us to implement solutions without specifying every last detail.

Machine Vision Solutions:

We've created multiple applications that use open source machine vision libraries to process images into engineering data. We've even contributed at least one code fix to an open source packages (after discovering a bug in a Niblack binarization filter).

Open source image processing and machine learning code offers an excellent opportunity to develop custom solutions at justifiable cost. We've got the expertise to get projects like this off the ground quickly.

Open Source Code:

We've kept our skills up and our ears to the ground in the open source world. There is a dearth of open source adoption across manufacturing companies, perhaps due to the secretive nature of the factory floor.

The explosive growth of open source systems shows how powerful they can be. Awareness of the available toolset is critical for any endeavor. We've always resisted recreating the wheel - Better to build on a tested foundation.

That's about all we can share at this time. We're always on the lookout for new opportunities that fit our skillset and mindset. If your company needs to get something done, GSDware is here to help.