Slam Stick is Now... enDAQ!

Slam Stick has  moved - to it's own dedicated website!

Through our growth and interactions with thousands of customers, two things have became evident. Firstly, there is a real need in the shock, vibration,and environmental sensing community for a dedicated platform, and secondly, the technology behind our popular Slam Stick products could be leveraged for even greater sensing systems.

The new platform will be called enDAQ (Engineering Data Acquisition). Our Slam Stick products will be folded under the enDAQ banner, and will be known as the S Series.

enDAQ will be a dedicated hub that offers products, services, a help center, dedicated blog, and community forum - it will serve as a convenient, configurable, and reliable platform to help people acquire data, analyze it, and then act upon it to improve their products, processes, and services.

Slam Stick Origins

Slam Stick officially started 10 years prior to us now rebranding and introducing the enDAQ platform. The Mide engineering company (of which we’re still a part of) had been working with testing systems since 1989 and developed their own data logging prototypes for DoD customers for many years. But it was our piezo energy harvesters, which we introduced in 2008, that eventually encouraged us to develop a commercial data logger. This first product was introduced to help conveniently quantify a vibration environment to understand if it was a good candidate for vibration energy harvesting. We called the simple tool a Slam Stick because it looked like a USB stick and was slammed down on a surface!

Our customers loved the convenience of the tool and began using it for general purpose vibration and shock testing - not just energy harvesting. Eventually we caught the interest of the US Navy who liked the simplicity and portability of the tool but they needed better data quality to base important maintenance decisions on and trust they were accurate. So in 2012 we began developing the next generation sensing system. We (still not the most creative!) called it Slam Stick X for “eXtreme” - a little corny!

Introduced in 2014 we quickly started growing with 500 units sold in 2015 and over 2,000 per year by 2017 - and we haven’t slowed down since! We have taken great pride in helping fellow test engineers and designers improve or create new systems; and we have enjoyed hearing the broad range of applications our products have been used in. We’ve heard of everything from bakery looking to reduce vibrations to help their bread rise more evenly to the military testing rockets and missiles.

From Sensor to Platform

Over the last 5 years we have continued investing heavily in R&D, after all we are development engineers at heart! We have introduced new embedded sensors (secondary accelerometers, gyroscope for orientation, humidity, light) and improved the original ones with better primary accelerometers (piezoelectric and piezoresistive options) and faster response times and a wider range for our temperature and pressure sensors. We have also added tons of capabilities to the firmware and software to make the sensors more configurable with intelligent triggering options and give you greater insight with more advanced analysis features.

Along the way we’ve learned that our core competency and technology is not solely as a shock and vibration recorder. We have built a highly configurable and scalable measurement and analysis platform. This platform can be expanded along a number of axes:

• More sensor options by allowing users to connect traditional accelerometers, strain gauges, load cells, pressure sensors, thermocouples etc.
• More communication options with the introduction of data transfer over WiFi, Bluetooth, radio, RFID, etc.
• More power options with larger batteries, external batteries, even going back to our roots and introducing energy harvesting options!
• More analysis features and report generation in our desktop apps and with the introduction of a cloud-based app to do analysis in real time and around the world.

We will continue to invest heavily in R&D to expand the capabilities of our platform and have big plans on what products to develop. But we want to hear from you and get your feedback to help prioritize these efforts into solutions for you! Visit our roadmap page to learn more.

The enDAQ Name

Once it became clear we were becoming a platform it became even more clear that we needed a new name. Slam Stick was a great name for the original product; but we felt that the name was constraining and cheapening us. We couldn’t be continually mistaken for a type of comedy that reminds you of the three stooges!

At first, because we were mostly a bunch of engineers, we started thinking of very literal name likes Mide Sensing Systems or combining two words together like SensorDAQ. But we found that these were either not very memorable or were already taken by other creatively challenged engineering companies. And that reminded us that what we are all about is not just the technology - but more importantly we are all about the engineering process and helping fellow engineers! We knew we needed to incorporate engineering into the name which led us to enDAQ for Engineering Data Acquisition.

Product Names are the Part Numbers

Slam Stick ≠ enDAQ

One point to clarify is that “a Slam Stick” is not “an enDAQ.” enDAQ is the platform that has sensors and software within its ecosystem - it is not the name of the physical recording system. So this means that we need to rename the products themselves. After all the back and forth coming up with the new brand name, we didn’t want to embark on a big effort of coming up with new product names, especially considering we planned to introduce many new products in the future. So we looked to the automotive industry where the luxury brands use simple alphanumeric identifiers for each of their series. This gives them flexibility to introduce a lot of closely related variants while letting them focus on the strength of the overarching brand name.

So this is exactly what we did, we have different series of sensors. Initially we have the S-Series to pay homage to Slam Stick with different numbers (S2 vs S3 vs S4) defining the physical form factor, and a secondary identifier that describes the specific sensor package like S3-E100D40 for a 100g piezoelectric accelerometer and a 40g DC-response secondary accelerometer. Soon we will be launching our W-Series for our wireless products, and in 2020 a H-Series for sensor “hubs” that will allow you to connect external sensors like accelerometers, strain gauges, thermocouples, etc. Our Help Center provides more information on this new numbing/naming convention. We think our customers will appreciate the brevity of this new part numbering convention!

So if Slam Sticks can’t be called enDAQs (gross) what will they be called? They’ll be called exactly what they are and what our customers have been referring to them for years: sensors, specifically enDAQ sensors. Historically the term sensor describes the specific sensing components like the ones embedded into our products. This means we could have called our devices sensing systems. But we are all about simplifying what has historically been needlessly complex. Sensors respond to physical stimulus, and that’s exactly what enDAQ sensors do - they measure multiple physical stimuli and, with accompanying analysis software, help the user respond to it. We help you acquire, analyze, and act!

What's New with the Website enDAQ.com?

Our new website is a dedicated site entirely to enDAQ. This platform emerged from Mide Technology and its engineering services which meant that Slam Stick was just a part of the original Mide website. This website had to cater to our piezo customers, seals customers, and general R&D customers - which limited the amount of real estate we could give to Slam Stick. As the popularity of Slam Stick grew, along with the content and tools we were providing, the site got more and more unwieldy.

Now with a dedicated site and accompanying brand we can share much more helpful content:

• There is a whole new education area with detailed articles on measurement and analysis fundamentals.
• Our Help Center is full of all the technical specs we can think of to help you understand how to use our sensors and software.
• The blog has been redesigned and dedicated entirely to the topics of measurement and analysis.
• We launched a community so we and members can share their test data, analysis reports, and tips.

The new site also makes comparing different enDAQ sensors easier with table-based catalog pages, and our product pages have all the necessary technical content right there - not buried away on a datasheet somewhere. Our software packages also have some much needed attention and real estate with their own area highlighting all the features and letting you download them for free.

Introducing New Sensors, Analysis Software & Services

The process of changing our name and launching a new website has taken us longer than we originally would have liked and it’s been a lot of work, but that’s not all we’ve been up to! With the launch of our website comes the launch of:

• Tom Irvine’s VibrationData Toolbox and accompanying handbook
• Completely revamped electronics in our enDAQ sensors along with a brand new “mini”
• Services to help you get the most value from our sensors and software
• Updated Analyzer software with more capabilities like integration for displacement

VibrationData Toolbox & Handbook

Tom Irvine is a legend when it comes to analyzing shock and vibration data and has a blog chock full of helpful content. He has developed a MATLAB package for signal analysis and structural dynamics that he has given away the source code for free for years. We partnered with him to compile that software package that we’re calling the VibrationData Toolbox. Now you can get the great functionality of this analysis software without a MATLAB license! You can download this for free directly from our website that also provides some helpful articles on how to use it.

We also worked with him to publish his new handbook called an Introduction to Shock and Vibration Response Spectra. Don’t let the word “introduction” in the title fool you though, it is nearly 300 pages long! We published all the content that can be seen in these freely accessible (and searchable) web pages, at the bottom of all these pages is a form to download the full PDF.

Updated and New enDAQ Sensors

We have spent over a year working on a new processor within the sensor that enables some short term improvements as well as setting the stage for many future developments (like wireless coming soon and onboard processing). The updated sensors include a better secondary accelerometer now that has far greater noise performance. Every device comes with more storage than before. And they use less power so they last longer.

Best of all, we also introduced a new product called the S2 which is even smaller!This model includes two accelerometers and the full range of environmental sensors to help you go in more places to measure your environment. Check out the full lineup of sensor options here!

Paid Services

We’re really excited to start offering paid services to help you get the most out of our platform.  Although we designed our platform to be intuitive we know how testing and analysis can be complex and time consuming. Being a part of Mide makes engineering services in our DNA, so we are really looking forward to partnering with our customers to help them better understand their test data and develop custom solutions to meet their needs.

New Version of Our Analyzer

The Analyzer 1.1 is also released that includes some more advanced analysis functions such as:

• Integration and double integration to get displacement data from acceleration
• Moving metrics such as mean, max, min, RMS, primary frequency to see how these metrics shift throughout a long file
• FindPeaks to provide statistics on the shock/peak events throughout a file such as the number of times a 5g shock event occurred
• Smoothing to clean up the waveforms in plots
• Plot editing to give you the information you need in the way you need it for your analysis reports

Download the latest version here and learn about all the new features: enDAQ Analyzer software.

What's Next?

We’ve been working on our new brand and accompanying new website for a long time.  We’re excited to get it out there and start focusing on building this platform for decades to come.  We’ve already started on additional developments that include:

1. A S-Series sensor (the S5) with a battery that has 4x the capacity of current models

2. W-Series sensors that have WiFi connectivity and a battery with 20x the current models

3. A cloud app to let you monitor data as its recorded and uploaded by W-Series sensors in real time

We are constantly innovating and looking to advance our platform, we’d love to hear your feedback to help us prioritize these developments! And we’d love to connect with you and hear your thoughts on this new website and new brand name - we hope you are excited as we are!