In order to reduce processing time and thus increase productivity, TRUMPF has developed an additional, mobile operating unit for its bending machine TruBend 5000: the new MobileControl Pro. The user can place the MobileControl Pro flexibly along the pressing bar and thus the operating unit is always within reach. On a 3.5 inch color display, the user can make all the entries required for the bending process, such as bending steps forwards / backwards or correction of angular and axial positions on the machine. In order to demonstrate the concept and to ensure the feasibility of the designed animations on a microcontroller, TRUMPF chose Embedded Wizard. The implementation of the GUI ready for production was necessary to ensure that various agents are able to communicate with one another in a complex control system via a CAN bus. The software development already started at an early stage of the project, when a number of hardware components were not yet determined.
With Embedded Wizard Studio's WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) approach, the Embedded Wizard Services team was very quickly able to create a prototype and demonstrate the feasibility of the product. The prototype software project was used as the basis for the product software. The data links and communication with the other agents in the system were conceptualized and implemented as an agile process, together with the other project partners, and optimized in several stages. The fact that the target hardware was only determined late in the development process led to no delay, because with Embedded Wizard Studio's programming language Chora the software development is independent of any platform. The platform-specific code is then generated by the corresponding Platform Package.
Product development was able to progress efficiently, as the final application was built directly on the prototype, eliminating the need for duplicate implementation. CPU-intensive animations were validated for feasibility and performance at an early stage, allowing the desired user experience to be assessed and refined from the outset. The use of Embedded Wizard and its automatically generated code ensured high stability and reliability, resulting in strong customer and user satisfaction. At the same time, additional features can be implemented quickly, and even if new hardware is introduced, the existing application code can be reused without difficulty.
