Hexagon Metrology standardizes on Wind River’s VxWorks for next-gen metrology equipment

ALAMEDA, USA: Wind River announced that Hexagon Metrology, a leading global provider of design, measurement, and visualization technologies, has chosen Wind River Platform for Industrial Devices for its latest coordinate measuring machine (CMM), the GLOBAL Silver. Such machines measure the physical characteristics of an object and allow Hexagon Metrology’s customers to fully control manufacturing processes that rely on dimensional precision, ensuring that manufactured products precisely conform to the original product design.

Wind River Platform for Industrial Devices provides industrial test and measurement developers with an embedded software development solution that combines Wind River’s VxWorks, the industry's leading real-time operating system; Wind River Workbench, the premier embedded software development suite; and essential networking and connectivity run-time technologies.

Wind River Platform for Industrial Devices addresses the challenges developers face by offering more choice, greater flexibility, and a comprehensive partner ecosystem to facilitate tighter product integration. The platform is backed by Wind River's 30 years of device software industry experience, a world-class support organization, and a specialized professional services team.

Hexagon Metrology is taking advantage of the modular firmware architecture based on VxWorks, and the application being used is characterized by strict determinism achieved by the real-time features of VxWorks. The New Bridge CMM GLOBAL Silver features outstanding accuracy, dynamics, and throughput for the dimensional inspection of mechanical components with tight tolerances. Its versatility allows it to be adapted for multiple vertical markets.

“Hexagon Metrology has selected Wind River as a development technology provider due to its well-established market leadership in the real-time operating system industrial application field,” said Dario Francescon, firmware and system design manager at Hexagon Metrology. “Wind River Platform for Industrial Devices is highly performing, stable, and well-supported in the long-term, all of which are necessary for providing a robust platform for a variety of metrology applications and enabling us to commit to a long-term investment.”

“Wind River technology has allowed Hexagon Metrology to undertake multi-task processing with faster computation and communication speed between controller, sensors, and actuators,” said Jens Wiegand, VP of industry solutions at Wind River. “We are very pleased to provide Hexagon Metrology with the software to enable the development of a high quality device that is recognized by its customers as credible, precise, and reliable.”