In 2007 we decided to downsize the company as the sales of software were not producing adequate returns to sustain the company long term. With just the two of us we were able to reduce our overheads, eventually both working from home, avoiding the overheads of rented office space. Hexatec became a 'virtual' company!
SCAN1000 / Saturn was largely left 'as-is', a C++ product. Various projects using Saturn had enabled us to develop a development base that meant we could design complex industrial I.T. systems without starting from scratch, sometimes including Saturn, sometimes not. The development tools had changed markedly from earlier years - a combination of small C# applications, SQL and asp.net website design were used on various projects, both for new and existing customers. Some projects included Saturn as an HMI, others not.
Our projects were mostly data capture based such as environmental and energy monitoring. We reconnected with a former N.E.W. employee who was now a consultant in wind power and developed several remote data capture systems - almost a full circle from 1982 and the WindLogger! Remote data capture was increasingly using internet and mobile phone connections enabling the data storage and processing to be remote from the transducers.
Existing customers systems were updated / replaced with web based designs which offered a lot more flexibility than the previous installations.
To reduce the design overhead for the websites, we designed our own Content Managment System (CMS) which could be used to create websites without the need to be a programmer. This was used in our own website which can still be viewed at www.hexatec.co.uk/Legacy and various customer systems. One such customer system was moved from the customer servers to our own online server with data collection via the internet to various data sources. We still maintain this system which now has 20 years of accumulated data logged every 15 minutes! Data is processed on a store and forward design, much like email. Data is collected close to source in small programmable devices (eWons). The data is then transferred to our server using ftp when possible. Should the ftp connection be unavailable then the eWons accumulate data until it can be forwarded. On larger systems, this process may be repeated upto larger, central servers.