Technical programming and data analytics
Approach
Nowadays, software is a vital component in any project. It simplifies the implementation of complex capabilities into products and generally provides a viable way of reducing their cost by shifting functionalities away from hardware.
Software is also one of the keys to reduce the Time-to-market and save money during the development process: It can be used to support and accelerate it, by automating or facilitating some (often repetitive) aspects, for example using graphical user interfaces (GUIs) to simplify the interaction of humans with code or machines, or using data reduction code to process and extract the key information from simulations or measured data.
Data analysis in particular is a field rapidly gaining importance in almost all human activities: Driven by the constantly decreasing price of sensors and data storage, the volumes of data gathered are constantly increasing, to the point that they often require careful planning and specialized hardware to be able to handle them, and specific know-how in sophisticated algorithms to extract the maximum amount of information.
Data is crucial for engineers to keep improving their products: gaining better insight of their behavior, precisely quantifying their performance, inferring their momentary internal states and even making predictions about their conditions in the near future are all invaluable information to help engineers make the right choices.
Some decisions can even be taken autonomously by algorithms, based on the data they are fed. This is the booming field of data analytics.
The availability of compact yet powerful computing hardware at low-cost, makes it even possible to integrate this inside a product and perform live data analytics within a running system. This opens the doors to many interesting applications for preventive maintenance optimization, downtime minimization, and system performance optimization in general.
Another specific field of great interest is image processing: From biology and life-sciences to industrial automation, from human behavior analysis to security applications, many projects generate large amounts of images that need to be analyzed, sometimes even live.
Nowadays a wide range of powerful algorithms exists, capable of extracting almost any information from photographic sequences or videos. The capabilities often truly surpass the imagination!
Our primary tool for all these applications is Matlab, which is a very powerful software suite, universally used for a variety of industrial and research applications worldwide, and therefore easily able to cover most of the needs of our clients. For other applications or where licensing costs are an issue, our programming know-how includes FORTRAN, C/C++ and Python as well.
We can therefore offer code porting services from one programming language to another, for instance from company heritage code in FORTRAN to the more modern, flexible and future-proof Matlab or the powerful and open source python.
Finally, our know-how in sensors and hardware allows us to offer a complete measurement service, covering the planning, implementation and execution of measurements, and the analysis of the data acquired using standard or ad-hoc code, to obtain the information you need in the format you want.
Competences
- Matlab, FORTRAN, C / C ++, Python
- Code porting / translation from a programming language into another
- Detailed code documentation and commenting (full know-how transfer)
- Data analysis and data analytics
- Measurements planning, execution and data reduction
Applications
- Computing programs for research applications (for example, terminal ballistics)
- Graphical user interfaces (GUI) for rapid evaluation of certain data or to control prototypes
- Data reduction and measurement data evaluation
- Coding & extension of existing programs
- Code porting to more modern programming languages
Projects
- Vector rotation by means of quaternions