Today every company claim to be innovative to have disruptive products and so on.
Reality is that most new products are in fact just a better / cheaper product with little or no innovation
Nicole Innovation helps you understand
Nicole Innovation has an extensive experience of the industrial world, especially in the machine industry.
We understand
We also act as Software Developer
In innovation projects one of the key aspect is that the market is unkown or badly known.
If the innovation is enough disrupting, the market may even not exist yet.
But it doesn't mean that you can do nothing to help structure your project. Several tools exists to understand what will be good or bad for the customer and where we should focus our effort.
"No one will ever pay you if you don't solve a problem"
With some methodology and experience, it is possible to understand what challenges our future customer are currently facing. creating a "Pain Book" will help focus our developments to what really maters for the customer
"I have a dream..."
Often the start of a innovation is a dream of a (future) customer. But the worst thing to do is to realize it without understanding why he was dreaming.
Spend some time to analyse the customer dreams / wishes and understand if the dream can come true or will be a business nightmare.
Nothing new... but at the same time often blur and empty statements, because the previous points have not been done well.
There is also good methodology to make sure that the future customer is ok with your ideas.
You are not alone on the market... good news! a market might exists.
But you also have to make sure that you will differentiate yourself in a way or another.
Check with your future market that your USP is really a Unique Selling Proposition
Technology is often important... but adequation with the market needs is even more important.
An innovation project is often an opportunity to revisit current technological choices. To find the right balance between reusing current technology and new technology is crucial
after almost 3 decades of experience in automation, we can help you choose the right approach for your project taking into account your history and existing assets.
We can also help you to transition into better practices like automated test, continuous integration where long the forgotten topics of automation software development. A lot of Myths exists like "real-time software needs hardware" which prevented a lot of companies to embrace one of the most effective practices of software development.
Networks were for long a very diverse world in automation and embedded products. In the last decade ethernet imposed itself for all non hard real-time critical communication.
We can help you simplify your architecture in many case. (see alsotools)
A lot of progress can also be done today in Human Machine Interface.
For decades HMI where standalone application running on a PC, written in Delphi or C++ or more recently C#.
today you can also consider a web approach that will enable much more device to connect like mobile phone, big TV as production dashboard and of course the machine touch panel. A full fledged web server like a python / django web server can run an any PC and offers much more flexibility than the traditional HMI and inherit from all capabilities developed for internet in term of reponsive design
In industrial company, IT value is often misunderstood.
In many case IT is perceived as a cost center rather than an opportunity to help create new business opportunity.
Many innovative products requires new IT development and create a new pressure on IT services.
In this field, there is no "one size fits all solution". Every company has its own history and why it might be difficult to introduce new services differs from company to company.
Is your IT still aligned with your business needs?
How will your new services integrate to your current IT System?
We can help you understand where you are and what to do to better develop software that is needed for your business.
Do you need to improve your development reliability by introducing Unit Testing / continuous Integration?
We can help teams to understand the benefice of Automated Tests practices and help them introduce such practices if this is not already the case
Some companies have lost track of what software is doing what and for what purposes in term of business process. This situation can be painful and can drive to difficulties introducing new business opportunities
We developed a tool DOC_IT aimed at helping small and medium business to document and plan their IT system
We can help to map part or all of your system in order to better manage what is doing what and understand where the process / systems can be optimized
We can not only provide service to help you structure your applications, but also help you as Software developers
We can also take part of the development of your product, or create a first mockup, proof of concept, or full development mastering the following tolls. It can involve hardware, or hardware debugging if necessary.
Python is probably one of the best current language. Clear Clean very decently efficient and easy to test.
It even has started to be present in the embedded world
Preferred choice for
Django is a very robust and secure framework for Web development. Not the only possible choice, Flask is maybe easier for small dev but not as robust
of course the must have as soon as the user interaction start to be important. Can also be used for the back-end with node.js
A bit more messy to test font-end code since there are tons of different tools.
but a fantastic ecosystem (d3 for data related visualisation...)
of course a must have
also must have. with Bootstrap and other.
Today a bit legacy, but still tons of HMI application to maintain.
very present in real-time system.
the de-facto standard for all PLC out of the big one. Very good choice, that also support unit testing so you can increase the software quality.
Long considered to be "for HMI only", today most automation code is running on a PC Based hardware, running with a Real-Time OS and or having an hypervisor that can run both hard real time and soft real time applications. Many vendors propose such hardware (usually bound with their own software stack).
A good choice to consider, especially if you need good processing power and have to embed it in your product.
For small device, if you want to develop quick with a good ecosystem, this is the choice.
For small device, poorer ecosystem than Arduino, but a lot of already existing design.
Almost any platform have a TCP/IP stack available. This should be the minimal choice for non hard real time connection, even on the smallest hardware platform
currently almost any platform can already have a http server (usually very simple and badly secured). but this is a game changer since even the smallest device can become easy to configure and debug with a simple browser.
For very long communication protocols in embedded systems were completely custom made. Now that almost any simple processor can afford to have a simple http connexion things can change. And using REST can improve drastically the clarity of the communication and ease the development using web technologies.
Ethercat is of course not the only choice for fieldbus, but is a very good choice when real-time matters a lot.
by e-mail: info@nicoleinnovation.com
by phone: +4178 353 3412
by mail: Nicole Innovation, sous-mont 18, CH-1032 Romanel-sur-Lausanne