Inventor in swing with Cleverscope

By ADAM GIFFORD

When Bart Schroder sought international certification for the defence training simulator firm he worked at, he struck a problem with the oscilloscopes.

The scopes - which display graphs of electrical signals - worked as they always had, throwing up the results on their little cathode ray screens.

But ISO certification is about recording and repeating work practices, and "I realised it was difficult for the engineers to record what was happening on the oscilloscope".

Schroder's answer was the Cleverscope, a device that includes the probes and signal-measuring electronics of the traditional oscilloscope but passes on the image generation and processing functions to a normal PC.

"It allows you to save readings, and copy and paste them into Word documents for reporting," he said.

Schroder left his job at simulator maker Oscmar a year ago to develop the hardware and software for the new device, with backing from wireless application pioneer Phil Holliday, who had just sold his Holliday Group to iTouch.

The fledgling company also benefited from a $27,000 investment from Technology New Zealand.

Because it has no screen and so needs a smaller power supply, the Cleverscope sells for about $1600, half the price of conventional oscilloscopes.

More importantly, it is one of the few oscilloscopes on the market which can process both analogue and digital signals.

Since most interfaces to digital devices tend to be analogue - for example, a keyboard - that makes it an ideal tool for engineers designing or building electronic equipment.

It is also finding customers among acoustic engineers, who need a measuring device they can plug into their laptop on site, and people monitoring machines in factories or remote sites.

The Cleverscope hit the market in May, and about 100 a month are being sold. Says Schroder: "Our goal is 7000 a year, which is about 1 per cent of the world market."