Unifying six surgical-instrument bending machines on one .NET HMI
Replacing a fleet of fragile VBasic/Windows-XP machine controllers with a single, consistently deployed .NET HMI — adding Cognex machine vision, OPC-UA, and barcode traceability.
Customer
A medical-device manufacturer producing surgical curettes on a line of six bending machines — each one running its own independently-configured control software.
Challenge
Every machine ran a separately-configured VBasic application on Windows XP. Each had a different configuration, different quirks, and no shared codebase. The control software was unmaintainable, depended on a third-party PLC driver that added licensing complexity, and had no path to modernization short of full replacement.
Operators had no unified view across the floor. Configuration changes required intervening on each machine individually, and any failure meant hunting through six different codebases to find the root cause.
Solution
We replaced the entire control stack with a single .NET HMI deployed identically across all six machines, with each machine's parameters managed in a separate configuration layer.
- Replaced the VBasic/Windows-XP application with a modern .NET WinForms HMI.
- Integrated Cognex machine vision for automated bend verification.
- Integrated OPC-UA for PLC communication — eliminating the third-party PLC driver entirely.
- Added barcode scanning for part tracking and traceability.
- Separated per-machine configuration from the application so parameters change without touching production code.
- Built a WiX Toolset installer for clean, repeatable deployment to every machine.
All six machines now run identical software with machine-specific configuration files. Deployment is a single installer run, the third-party driver dependency is gone, and operators work from one consistent interface across the floor — with configuration changes validated without ever editing production code.