Designed by the person who has to make it work

The situation

The library asked us to debug a single room that was not behaving.

What we did

We fixed it, and it stayed fixed. That led to a second room, then a third, then five. Today we support AV across nearly the whole building, close to 20 rooms.

Where it is now

The library is growing, and we are helping plan the expansion. Because we program what we design, the new space is designed so it does not inherit the problems of the old.

Fix one room well and you get asked about the next.

The situation

The programmer who built the control system had left, and the system was locked. Many floors ran older technology. The hotel dealt with a steady stream of broken relays and offline equipment, and the integrator had spent more than five years on biweekly service calls, many for issues that were not theirs to begin with.

Getting in, the right way

With the owner's authorization, we factory reset and recovered the locked gear. Then we did what should have been done at the start: set proper passwords held by the right people, and put the software under version control.

What we found

The real problem was visibility. Nobody knew something had failed until a guest or staff member reported it.

What we built

Code that detects offline equipment and failing relays, so problems surface before guests feel them. We also found that a crashing system, which looked like it needed a costly code update, ran cleanly on upgraded hardware. That cut costs substantially and let us put our time into the more important work: a network-centric design.

The result

Service calls are down and still falling. The goal is automatic notifications when equipment goes offline, so the hotel and integrator act before anyone notices. Rollout to the existing floors is underway, and the solution has become the model for how the hotel modernizes and standardizes. The integrator gets the credit, and they have earned it.

You can't fix what you can't see. We made the system tell on itself.

The situation

A residential integrator wanted something that would set them apart from every other shop in their market.

What we designed and built

A license plate recognition system. Each registered vehicle is stored in a database and triggers its own actions: the right gate opens, the right garage door opens, for the right car. The plate reader was a separate system we had to integrate with and figure out. It was a puzzle, and we solved it.

Built for what the customer already owns

The system runs on traditional 30-series software and older hardware, so the customer did not have to replace equipment to get it. Plate data is stored and accessed under controls we set with the integrator.

The result

The system ran for a year without a service call. Then the integrator called us back. Nothing was broken. They wanted it to do more.

The best sign a system worked is a call that starts with "what else can it do?"