Design

When talking to a client, a designer will often say: "Fast, cheap or good; pick two, but you can't have all three".  We are trying to change this tradeoff, by utilising new processes and paradigms, such as crowd-sourcing.

We believe in the 1:10:100 design:engineering:manufacturing ratio.  This ratio of marginal improvement equates 1 hour of R&D as the equivalent of 10 hours of engineering work versus 100 hours of manufacturing work.  For every extra hour of good R&D design, you will save 100 hours of manufacturing work on the back end. 

We believe in "doing the integration" – doing the hard theoretical work that makes the ultimate result much more valuable by using less hardware and requiring less run-time.  Similarly, we fundamentally believe that smarter algorithms actually require cheaper hardware.

We believe in the four R's of good design (and intelligent maintenance).  They are:

1. Robustness: the ability of a system to cope with failures during operation and cope with erroneous input.
2. Resilience: the ability of a system to spring back into shape, its elasticity and capacity to recover quickly from difficulties.
3. Redundancy: the duplication of critical components or functions of a system with the intention of increasing reliability of the system, usually in the form of a backup or fail-safe.  Redundancy helps a system be Robust.
4. Ruggedness: the ability of a system to endure hardship, wear, etc, to be strong and tough.

Intelligent maintenance is where data from the machinery is collected and often self-analysed in order to predict and prevent potential failures.  Contrast this with the much more common (and costly) preventative maintenance, where maintenance is scheduled (and paid for) without prior knowledge if maintenance is required.

We believe in moving complexity of design from the mechanical side to the software side, where possible, to minimise the number of moving parts.  

Move software development processes to the hardware side, where possible.