One of the most common operations carried out in engineering firms and laboratories is the configuration of, and subsequent acquisition of data from, electronically driven instrumentation. The growth in high-throughput experimentation in the pharmaceutical, biotech and material science industries has seen a huge explosion in the need for lab automation. Outside high-throughput experimentation, instrument control systems are put to a wide range of uses, such as robotic control and non-destructive testing in the automotive industry, medical monitoring, drug delivery and industrial analysis using x-ray fluorescence and infrared technologies.

There is a wide variety of data that may be acquired, from gene sequences through standard resistance and temperature measurements to hardware specific readings, but the underlying problem is generic. Manual configuration of the hardware, data acquisition, result calculation and report production can be a long, tedious and time-consuming process. Using software to automate the process speeds it up, minimizes human errors and increases efficiency. Computer power can also be brought to bear on the problem of data analysis, allowing more sophisticated analyses to be carried out in less time.

Tessella has wide-ranging experience of design, development and testing on many data acquisition and instrument control projects. Our skilled developers are experienced in technologies that facilitate the data acquisition process, such as C/C++, LabView and embedded systems programming. We also have many years of experience in creating tailored data analysis and visualization applications to suit our customers' needs.