Over 30 years of manufacturing software development experience - from multitasking embedded real time tool control up through MES and plant wide reporting levels. From custom software development to learning and enhancing existing systems. Extensive tool interfacing expertise. Extensive coding, project management, documentation & user training experience.

A Common Scenario: There are two ways to diagnose manufacturing process problems:

1. Replicate the conditions in the lab, or
2. Interface to the tool(s) and collect the process data - to determine the difference between good and bad product.

For the 2nd, there are three aspects to tool interfacing and process data collection:

1. Interfacing to the tool (the actual rs232 or secs/gem interfacing software should be cheap).
2. Correlating process (and material, operator, maintenance state) data to product. Without this correlation, data collection is useless.
3. Storing, looking up, and retrieving data.
If your engineers rely on Excel, and you can't give them the data in Excel, then the system won't be worth much

Portfolio of Sample Problems & Solutions:

 

Mission critical internal systems implemented for Novati Technologies and American Gold Exchange

Other Examples (click on image):

White & Gray Design	Ecommerce Prototype	Drupal Site	WordPress Site

Only the center patterns of the coins use "shadow maps" extracted from photos.
All the rest are NOT photographs. They are (photo realistic) digital images produced using Modo .

Consider interactive Flash for your web site

Whether it's marketing, sales or support: interactive "hands on" tools will help users understand your area of expertise and improve search engine hits.

Examples:

Off the Shelf or Custom Software?

Big "Top Down - One Size Fits All" Software Solutions Sometimes Fall Short: Often it is better to solve unique problems with a collection of "point solutions" rather than use bigger, broader but less specific generalized software. In many cases, these big packages can only roughly anticipate the problems of any specific customer, and they wind up only being marginally useful. Adding features to try to remedy this dilemma over a wide customer base are what typically sell off the shelf software upgrades - but these in turn cause many commercial software applications to become bloated and expensive, and can rapidly make any particular software version obsolete and unsupported when it comes to fixing bugs and usability nuisances.

Smaller Rapid Custom Software Module Development quickly shows whether a software solution will fit your needs: Ken Freed Software develops custom software specifically for YOU, with the right degree of generalization for YOUR likely future needs, often using rapid prototyping and iterative development to quickly zero in on YOUR requirements. And unlike off the shelf software, getting the source code so YOU can control long term support (as well as integrate existing custom software applications together into a more generalized package in what's known as a "bottom up" approach) is never a problem with Ken Freed Software.

Software Methodology that's Cost Effective because it's "Sized Right"

While it's a given that the only thing worse than too much documentation and too many procedures is the chaos resulting from none at all -  in many cases the "one size fits all" scope of many formal software methodologies drags in non essential overhead. This is basically done to insure that a wide variety of developers in bigger organizations are in sync with customers on requirements, scheduling and progress - irregardless of who specifically staffs the project.

The experience of many years of establishing successful customer relationships enables Ken Freed Software to reduce the amount of formal project management documentation to match the context at hand. Only what's actually essential to get things done (usually concentrating on listing what will be developed and how much effort it will take) is documented, with other details handled informally. As a general guideline, if a project's formal documentation exceeds twelve pages not only will no one read it - the project is too big and will be broken down into a series of smaller projects/phases or milestone deliverables.

Here are some quick overview documents containing code snippets and the (non-obvious and often skipped over) subtleties one often forgets when moving between languages and environments. They are included here both for convenience and as a way of gauging experience:

Ken's PHP5 & MySQL Notes | Ken's jQuery Dialog Box Notes | SQL Server Stored Procedure Notes | Ken's Perl & DBI Notes | Ken's SQL Syntax Refresher | Ken's Javascript & JQuery Notes | Ken's Java Notes | Ken's C# Notes | Ken's Tcl/Tk Notes | Ken's Visual Basic Notes | Ken's Excel VBA Notes | Sample DLL Creation | Sample Secs-I Binary Data Exchange | Sample Paypal Data Exchange | Vax/VMS Notes |