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It's story time. . . CTM is dedicated to designing high-quality products that meet and exceed the requirements of our clients.

Our products have helped various industries by being functional, reliable, technically advanced, cost effective, practical and serviceable.

Here are some specific examples:

functional:
One client came to us with an instrument that they were importing from the United States. The product did not work properly in the more severe weather conditions in north central Alberta. The manufacturer did not want to make changes to the product because they thought that it worked fine for them. We used the basic concept and developed a new product that had many improvements in functionality. Our client is considering exporting the new product back to the United States.

reliable:
We designed a controller for line painting trucks that repaint lines on highways. We wanted the units to be reliable because the painting season is short and they cannot afford to have a truck down because of a failed control system. This equipment is mounted on a truck with a large engine driven compressor and generator so there is lots of vibration. There is paint mist everywhere so the environment is very dirty. Some of these units have been running flawlessly since 1993, we had the first pair of controllers back this year to get new labels because the labels were worn through.

technically advanced:
Our principals and staff are named as inventors on eight US and Canadian Patents. We have presented papers at several technical societies. One client needed to find a way to automatically process signal data received from a oil well depth measurement instrument (we designed the instrument for them as well). Normally, the data collected is plotted out in a long strip chart and analyzed manually to try to figure out the depth of the fluid in the well. We used criteria that a person would use to visually analyze the data. We invented a digital analysis algorithm that would perform the analysis in the instrument with excellent correlation to the best manual analysis.

cost effective:
One client wanted to make a clinical instrument that would do a dedicated function; measure the concentration of DNA molecules in a test tube sample. The lab instrument that could do this function cost about $100k and was about the size of a desk. It required a skilled operator to run that instrument and perform the required calibrations. We designed a small instrument about the size of a loaf of bread that would do the spectrofluorimeter function amazingly well. We developed a simple calibration procedure using reference samples. The instrument could be used in a clinical lab with essentially no training, and the cost to the lab was about $2500.

practical:
One client was using a lab instrument for doing field testing of buried cables.  They were lugging this instrument around in a field truck, across ditches summer and winter.  The lab instrument was very expensive and not suited for portable use.  CTM designed a hand-held instrument that would do the job rain or shine or snow that cost about 10% of the equivalent lab instrument.

serviceable:
One client wanted an instrument that would be expandable and could be updated with new functionality over time. The project started in 1995 and there have eight revisions, updates, and new feature enhancements since then. The present firmware will still operate on the original hardware. Designing in expandability and upgradeability is often a key design criteria.