Fast prototyping

Benestad was testing a new product technology, which involved precise controlling of lasers for material heating. For their laboratory trials, they required a prototype manufacturing cell supporting easy adjustment of manufacturing parameters and data acquisition for documentation of each produced unit. The control system had to be able to support an easy evolution to a low volume manufacturing and be further expanded to multi-cell volume production.

CDP Studio was used for fast prototyping and implementation of new manufacturing cell. The control system was built using a standard office computer connected to a Wago remote I/O, interfacing control lines, temperature sensors, contactors, and control switches. The process was set up and logged on a customized GUI on the computer, allowing for fine-tuned control of the temperature cycles.

Open, flexible and with pre-made core functionality

CDP Studio comes with a toolbox of features enabling fast development of the actual manufacturing logic without spending time on basic features or setting up the core system. CDP systems are modular giving you a good flexibility in the system design and development. Adding new functions, sensors or adapting features is limited to the changed parts and changes have little impact on the functional core application.

The GUI Designer in CDP Studio demonstrated its value with premade graphical elements and the tight integration with the control application, as a complex and flexible operator panel was required in the R&D phase.

The system should evolve into a production system, so the ability to move applications to industrial hardware later was essential. CDP Studio is hardware agnostic and comes with pre-made support for different industrial IO suppliers and toolchains for different hardware platforms.

Changing industrial protocols, adding or removing sensors or changing hardware platforms is easily achieved by simple configuration changes using the pre-made functionality and features.

Supported by our professional consultants

CDP Technologies consultants worked tight with the customer to create the software components and the initial application with GUI. The system could now be tuned and modified by the research engineers, having a deep knowledge of the physical process, but limited software competence. This separation of software development and system configuration in CDP Studio lowers the threshold to implement flexible software-based control systems.

About Benestad

Benestad is a manufacturer of customized glass/ceramics-to-metal sealed products. The company delivers Penetrators, Connectors and Sensors to the oil and gas industry and high precision Ignitors to the defense industry. The products are used wherever protecting the environment and personell safety really matters.

The company was founded in 1973 and is located in Lierskogen Norway, 30km south of Oslo.