Dan Waters
dwaters at usinternet.com
Fri Feb 25 18:54:33 CST 2005
Drew, My thought is that what is marketable is your ability to develop a data acquisition package. You've got experience on two different machines now, and these were only the first two that you tried. I am (was?) a Quality Engineer in a manufacturing environment, and I know that there are many different types of measuring equipment. And, I've been a Design Engineer, and I know that most prototype testing software is also custom. So, your product is YOU! Best of luck! Dan Waters ProMation Systems -----Original Message----- From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com [mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of DWUTKA at marlow.com Sent: Friday, February 25, 2005 5:20 PM To: AccessD at databaseadvisors.com Subject: [AccessD] Web based Data Acquisition Application. Okay, this isn't a technical question, it's more like a marketing one. My company is a manufacturing company, which has several 'test machines' which are basically computers hooked up (through engineering cards) to test equipment. Most of these systems have custom built 'test software'. I've been here for five years, and I have yet to find the software engineer who actually knows his left from his right in a database. The databases they are dumping data into are horribly designed. For example, we have a few 'EZ Testers', which dump their data into one database, in fact, ONE TABLE in that database. This table has over a hundred fields. Each product that is tested, and each test, use only certain fields, so there is a lot of wasted space, and even worse, the searching of this database is a virtual nightmare. A few years ago, we bought a CMM machine, it's a visual inspection machine (pretty slick, measures things with a digital camera). It came with it's own program, which has a GUI that 'writes' QVScript (which is essentially VB Script, just with it's own object model, and a few other quirks. It has no default data capture system (other then to the screen), so I was asked to capture the data. I wrote a very specialized .dll, that QVBasic could use to dump it's data into an Access database. Worked fine. They only needed two types of 'data dumps', so I wrote two versions of the .dll. Quick, fast, took me no more then an hour or two to whip up the .dll's. Now a few months ago, we bought a second CMM. This one was going to test a lot more then 2 different things, so it needed to be flexible. I also figured that since this was going to be my second 'test machine' database, I figured I might as well prepare for the future, and create a completely generic data acquisition system. Which I did, sort of. I have the data acquisition part done, but haven't completed the reporting capability. In a month or so, I will finally be able to start actually developing again (right now, I'm too busy being a Network Admin, and PC tech! LOL). My first project is going to be to finish the data acquisition program. So here's my question. Does anyone know if this kind of thing would have a market for it, and if so, are their competing products, and what do they cost? Drew -- AccessD mailing list AccessD at databaseadvisors.com http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/accessd Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com