Case Study

Fifty Years of Testing Machines, One New Way to Control Them

Industry

Materials Testing / Testing Machines / Electronics

Location

Germany

Client Bio

DOLI Elektronik has spent fifty years building the control electronics behind materials testing machines. For its fiftieth anniversary in June 2026, the company wanted visitors to experience something they could pick up and use rather than watch from behind a barrier: a new way of operating a running tensile testing machine.

These machines have long been driven from a handheld unit with a combination of a small monochromatic display and physical buttons -robust, familiar, and well proven in daily use. DOLI wanted to explore what the same job looks like when that unit becomes a touch display, and partnered with us for the software side: a control application running on DOLI's hardware and integrated directly with DOLI's own DoPE API, showing the test as it happens.

Scope was agreed with DOLI's team in a working session before anything was priced, and the prototype was completed ahead of the anniversary date.

“With our 50th anniversary approaching, timing was critical. Intertec clearly understood our top priorities and delivered precisely on schedule. Their agile development approach proved to be exactly the right choice: our teams collaborated seamlessly, and communication was effortless throughout. The solution and its live demonstration sparked precisely the kind of dialogue we had
hoped to have with our customers."

Fabian Wunn, Head of R&D department

The challenge

A date that could not move. A fiftieth anniversary with guests, customers and a working machine on the
floor. The demonstration had to run on the day, for the first time with no room for error. A new hardware device to control the machine. Instead of physical buttons the functions need to be implemented in software.

Measurement data arriving faster than a screen can normally follow. Test data is produced far more quickly than a conventional request-response interface can carry, and far more quickly than a standard chart can draw.

A proprietary control platform to integrate with. The new control had to speak to DOLI's DoPE API directly, without an additional layer that would introduce delay or a second component to maintain.

Our solution

We designed and built the software -a fully functional touch-based control application, running on DOLI's hardware and operating a real testing machine end to end.

At the anniversary demonstration, a visitor could pick up the handheld display, move the machine's crosshead by hand gesture, run a tensile test on a specimen through to fracture, and watch the force curve build and peak on screen in real time.

The application includes:

- Gesture-based machine control -crosshead movement driven by touch, in place of the fixed-button interaction model.

- Live test visualisation -the force curve rendered on the handheld as the test runs. 
The visualization rate of the app was ~25fps, matching 10kHz was documented as a possible future implementation but never realised. Both the data transport and the charting were engineered against that rate rather than chosen for convenience: measurement streams over a persistent connection, and the chart was performance-tested to keep pace with the machine.

- Direct integration with DOLI's DoPE API -native bindings written for the purpose, keeping the path between operator input and machine response as short as possible. 

- An architecture that leaves the roadmap open -features placed outside the initial scope were captured during the scoping session specifically so the build would not stand in their way later.

The work ran in four milestone phases, each with a defined deliverable accepted before the next began, with completion targeted several weeks ahead of the anniversary.

Published with the kind permission of DOLI Elektronik GmbH.

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