About Us
All problems are solvable and we believe, through exploration, people can solve them. Creators and problem-solvers need the freedom to explore. We empower them to solve their most compelling problems through accessible, time-saving innovations.
To achieve these innovations we’ve come up with a winning strategy:
Target key functionality
Develop versatile products
Modularize relentlessly
Services and support
Our Story
In our combined decades of experience developing products and offering services at numerous companies and in over a dozen industries, we have seen a recurring challenge. Engineering hardware, tools, and systems are unreasonably expensive. Anyone who has worked in an under-funded industry group, a startup, a DIY project, or academia can relate to the sentiment: “THAT is too expensive! If I had the time, I could make one for a fraction of the cost.”
Whether to launch game-changing ideas from humble beginnings in a garage, enable budget-restricted hiring managers to provide tools for their expanding groups, or allow students to design and test their work at home, there is an underserved need to provide affordable engineering tools and empower the ingenuity of these people. More challenging still is to develop these products to be reliable.
In addition to that, being considered experts “skilled-in-the-art” of engineering and product development, as well as budget-conscious consumers ourselves, we have often questioned the choice between certain every-day use high-tech products being overpriced or unreliable.
We have decided to take on these challenges, with a brand focused on empowering creators and problem-solvers by developing accessible and time saving innovations both for products we bring to the market or as a service for those of our clients.
Our Approach
Target key functionality
The history of product development in the 20th and 21st centuries, from the “more buttons” approach of the 50s to the “more settings” theme of the 90s, has led to a legacy of products targeted to be complex and invariably expensive. Our company is focused on targeting key functionality, invariably making our products simpler yet more versatile, lower cost yet more robust.
Develop versatile products
Versatility offers enormous savings to our customers. Too often, we find ourselves saying “if this thing didn’t prevent me from doing that, I’d be able to use it here, there, and over there”. Do you really need five different handheld meters with five different sensors doing the same basic thing, or do you just need that one great meter which works with all of them? What if that meter was able to send signals back? What would you control with it?
Modularize relentlessly
Our approach enables us to keep modularizing, significantly driving down costs even further. Every commercial product we make is our gold standard for what we need ourselves and expect to use in our workspace and other products. Think economies-of-scale.
Services and support
We invest heavily in talking to our customers and understanding their needs and pain-points. Therefore allowing us to better understand customer needs and have a great product support team. Investing in this enables robust products, and great products reduce burdens on support teams. It’s a win-win.
Our Core Team
Our collective past individual experiences and accomplishments highlight the reasons we can meet our goals and succeed in our claims.
68
Years Experience Decades of combined individual experience
23
Companies In established firms and startups
12
Key Industries Spread out over a dozen competitive industries
28
Patents and Publications Contributing technology and innovation to our fields
$400m
Assets Managed With trusted leadership responsibilities
$375k
Personal Awards For recognized independent capabilities
15
Industry Panels and Presentations Involved in our professional communities
10
Academic Degrees From BScs to PhDs, awarded or in progress
Our individual past experiences span numerous industries, including automotive and electric vehicles, aerospace and electric aircraft, electric utilities and renewables, defense, oil and gas, electronics, robotics, biomedical devices, and large motor manufacturing. Many of these have experienced rapid modernization in recent years, and have therefore required aggressive state-of-the-art approaches.
We gained our individual professional and academic experiences while living in several different countries, including Canada, US, Sweden, Finland, Spain, England, Austria, and Saudi Arabia. Understanding regional needs and cultural diversity is one of our unique strengths.
Finally, our core team loves to give back to the community. Whether it’s for philanthropy with the Special Olympics or Engineers Without Borders, student design teams such as for FSAE or Rocket, or professional associations like the IEEE, IEE, ASTM, ASQ, or APICS, the members of our core team continue to be active in a variety of volunteer activities.
Our Products and Services
Our First Product
ARCIMUSE is a cost-effective diagnostics tool that inspires rapid and economical debugging sessions. Our first product is motivated by the need to raise awareness and educate new developers on the value of industry best-practices like the V-Model Development Cycle, while removing the burden of building, maintaining, and debugging complex breadboarded systems to physically interact with their microcontrollers.
For experienced developers, we’ve designed a low-cost tool that provides the functionality of a voltmeter, a user interface panel, an annunciator panel, as well as some waveform analysis capability similar to that of modern oscilloscopes. In addition, the tool can continuously monitor and display memory variables without a computer, enabling rapid run-time and in-situ debugging.
The Motivation
Why would we develop such a device you ask?
Promotes industry best-practices
Technical development is rapidly changing and developers are expected to do more with less. Having an integrated testing environment with your hardware and software design is increasingly important to reach quicker milestones and captivate your imagination.
Small, intuitive, & affordable
Saves resources otherwise spent on expensive test equipment with critical functionality of key devices built-in and easy to understand.
V-Model Development Cycle
The V-Model is a systematic way of breaking down your idea into its smallest needs (or requirements), each being met with a designed solution. These solutions are then integrated and validated through tests at each level.
At the top level, the requirements justify the need or the business case thereby defining the product. In turn, they create requirements resulting in a design of the various systems it contains. In our version, the system-level requirements feed into subsystem and so forth, down to low-level implementation in the form of hardware or code. From this lowest level, and iteratively up to the highest level, the requirements are tested to validate the design.
The approach has a long and rich history in industry. Whether to manage development of every feature of an automotive product, every capability of an automated gardening system, or structuring the needs of your design process itself, managing and validating requirements has been a fundamental component of product and process development for decades.
Our Culture
Our Locations
California
Our head office, including business development, marketing, legal, etc. This is where we met and started our activities, and where hard tech never sleeps.
Indiana
Our core engineering and R&D activities, combined with access to resources at a world-class engineering university.
British Columbia
Our engineering and business support services subsidiary, allowing us to leverage the tech boom in the Canadian west coast.