Customer Background
Headquartered in the US, our customer is an established market leader in delivering innovative electronic instruments and electromechanical device solutions. With 90+ years of market dominance and presence in 150+ cities across 30 countries, the company provides a wide range of cutting-edge solutions for the industrial markets, the oil and gas industry and the medical industry.
Customer Need
The gateway that managed the customer’s instrumentation product line was built using PCB (Printed Circuit Boards), which were rendered obsolete in the market. The customer partnered with Softdel to breathe new life into their gateway solution, enhance the overall offering with extensive software functionalities while upgrading the hardware environment to increase its business value and market appeal.
Softdel’s Solution
- Softdel redesigned the hardware and upgraded the PCB of the gateway with the latest hardware components, thereby reducing the BOM (Bills of Material) cost and the form factor.
- The gateway application codebase was modernised to create a new platform with additional functionalities that includes:
- A web-enabled user interface supporting up to 16 devices.
- Extended support for Foundation Fieldbus and Modbus TCP to ensure gateway interoperability with multiple communication protocols.
- An interfacing ability to the solution via File Transfer Protocol (FTP), telnet, Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), and a webserver for enhanced two-way device communication.
Standards and Technology
Communication Protocols: FTP, Telnet, Modbus/TCP, Modbus-RTU, HTTP, SMTP, Foundation Fieldbus
Certification Standards: EMI/EMC, UL
Operating System: MQX RTOS from NXP microcontroller
Benefits
- Operational efficiencies: Scalability increased as the customer could connect multiple instruments to one common remote gateway. Response times also greatly improved with the enhanced interfacing ability the solution provided.
- Competitive advantage: Softdel not only enabled seamless platform migration but also ensured timely delivery of the gateway solution, thus, increasing the customer's market readiness, and helping them capitalise on time-bound business opportunities.
- Cost-effective: The subsequent reduced non-recurring engineering (NRE) cost, a direct result of Softdel’s successful solution, allowed the customer to achieve their targeted ROI within a year.
