Manufacturing and Engineering Magazine Volume 425 - January 2016 | Page 57

MARINE ACTISENSE

4

With fourteen years of life behind
it, Actisense has become a key
player in the marine electronics
industry and has supplied products to over 30 countries around
the world. It's with a dedication to quality and
reliability that the Dorset-based company has
acquired a competitive edge over others and is
now the go-to in intelligent sensors and interfaces. Thanks to Actisense's keen eye for detail
and emphasis on making the little things count,
the marine electronics sector, in particular, now
stands in good stead to become a springboard
for the industry as a whole.
Recognising how the sector was held back by
the electrical components and software in use,
Actisense set about stimulating change –
starting from the bottom. Principal was
securing a reliability and technical
refinement previously unseen in
marine electronics. As Phil
Whitehurst, CEO of
Actisense details,
“We started off with
some fairly conventional products in the
first few years with a
view to encouraging better
practice at a very initial level.
We'd noticed several limitations
with the use of standard microproces-

sors and so set about making use of things like the
ARM 32-bit processor range. While they've
become widely-used in mobile phones now, we
were amongst the first to introduce them to the
marine electronics sector.”
It was a move which meant its products had, in
fact, more processing power than they needed;
were effectively over-engineered, and yet allowed
the company to supplement additional features
more easily. In view of its aptitude in design and
engineering development, Actisense is preparing
to diversify into the commercial marine market – a
move for which it will certainly require versatility
and adaptability. Already successful in the leisure
marine market, the company has witnessed soaring demand in the commercial sector owing to the
gains in reliability its products are able to provide.
With a view to facilitating its new popularity,
Actisense has driven the optimisation of its interfacing products, as Whitehurst makes clear,
“We've listened to our customers and taken the
opportunity to re-engineer some of our equipment
in order to better provide for that market: making
our interfaces bigger and more robust while
retaining the internal technology we've worked
hard to perfect.
“Within marine technology, there are various
points where interfacing needs to connect materials and processes together. Problematically, at
each point of linkage, there are various different
standards, making it hard for these things to talk to

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