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DEWE-FACT
Dewetron GesmbH in Austria started in 1989. Dewetron Inc in the USA started in 1998.

DEEP THOUGHT
"You see, a wire telegraph is a kind of very, very long cat.
You pull his tail in New York, and his head is meowing in Los Angeles.
Do you understand this?
And radio operates exactly the same way:
you send signals here, they receive them there.
The only difference is that there is no cat"
~Albert Einstein

About Dewetron USA

In an era when it seems like most companies are closing factories and shipping jobs to China or Mexico, Dewetron is doing just the opposite. We are building more and more products right here in the USA, and increasing our manufacturing capacity. We moved into a larger facility in August 2007, doubling our space for manufacturing, stock, service, and customer training - not to mention office space in general. We have been making an increasing investment in American jobs, technology, research and development, and have no intention of changing course now. Yes, Dewetron is a worldwide company, with major offices in Austria, USA, Germany, Korea, China, Slovenia, and more. But there are only three Dewetron companies which manufacture finished products: Dewetron Austria - where most products are made; Dewetron USA, where the DEWE-3000 and DEWE-901 series are made; and Dewesoft Slovenia, where the DEWE-43 and DEWE-101 are made. The focus of this page is on Dewetron USA, located in Rhode Island in southern New England, about 90 miles south of Boston and 180 miles E-N-E of New York City.

Dewetron USA (aka Dewetron Inc.) was founded in 1998 as an independent U.S. company, incorporated in RI and owned by Grant and Susan Smith, who started the company from scratch. Since those early years we have grown to become a vital engineering and manufacturing arm of Dewetron worldwide. At the end of 2009 we had about 15 employees, most of whom work at the company’s RI headquarters (Dewetron worldwide has about 200 employees).

Products made in the USA:

Service and Calibration

When you build something, you have to support it. If it’s an instrument, then you also need to be able to calibrate it according to international (ISO) and USA (NIST) standards. This is exactly what we can do for you, both in America at Dewetron, Inc., as well as in Europe at Dewetron in Austria. We have comprehensive service and support facilities around the globe, and traceable calibration facilities in the USA and Europe. We stand behind our products, which means that we stand behind you, our valued customer. We made a major investment in duplicating the same Fluke METCAL system that Dewetron uses in Austria, right here in Rhode Island, so we can provide AS FOUND calibration, cal adjustments, and AS LEFT calibrations, traceable to NIST, for every Dewetron product.

It is rarely practical or cost effective to send products to Austria for service or calibration, so we have a fully staffed service department here, capable of fixing anything, anytime. We make products here after all, so there is no problem in repairing them, even completely rebuilding them if needed. Service and manufacturing are in the same group, so that we can maintain the same quality standards when we fix something as when we made it to begin with. We are also connected closely with Dewetron service and engineering in Europe, so that when we repair products made in Austria, that we observe the same standards. We are proud of our products, and we are ready, willing, and able to support them 100%, to ensure your satisfaction and continued patronage.

Factory and on-site training services
In 2006 we started conducting training classes at our factory in RI, and as of today, more than 300 people have visited and taken the 2.5 day “DEWE-U” curriculum. We really appreciate it when our customers visit us, so we can show them the company, and also show them the best parts of Rhode Island. So we always have great dinners in Newport and Narragansett, right by the ocean. The third day is a half day special event highlighting an application of data acquisition. Often we drive fast cars at a test track, and instrument one of them with our equipment to study the dynamics and driver performance. A complete list of attendees would fill the page, but here are a few of the major companies who have sent people here for classroom training: US Navy, Lockheed Martin (numerous facilities), Honeywell (several facilities), Nissan, Bosch, ASRC,

But sometimes we are called upon to provide on-site training, and we have conducted dozens of these over the years as well, and graduated several hundred more engineers and technicians at companies such as USA - NSDL, NASA, Duke Energy, and many more.

Timeline of Dewetron USA Events

1998 - company is founded by Grant & Susan Smith
1999 - assisted in the design of Dewesoft acquisition software
In the 1990s, Dewetron was known for its portable data acquisition hardware, but not its software. In 2000 we undertook a huge effort to develop our own software package, which would eventually be called DEWESoft. Three Dewetron engineers spend 3 weeks together in Rhode Island and mapped out the program’s basic interface and capabilities, and made a five year plan for its continuing development. These were Jure Knez of Dewetron Slovenia, Gerald Zotzeck of Dewetron Austria, and Grant Smith of Dewetron USA. The Slovenian government would later award these three innovators a technology prize for the invention of Dewesoft. This award and medal are on display in the Dewetron USA lobby.

2000 - moved into 1800 ft2 Charlestown facility
From 1998 to 1999, Dewetron consisted of only a few people, so the company was run from Grant Smith’s home, but in 2000 we moved to a large facility in Charlestown, RI, and started hiring, quadrupling the size of the company in the next few years. In 2002 we took another 2000 ft2 of space in the facility, and grew again, adding more service people and technicians, as well as back-office support and sales people.

2004 - developed the first battery-powered Dewetron instrument
In 2004 we invented the first battery powered Dewetron system, the DA-120 (now called the DEWE-3031). This launched Dewetron USA into the world of manufacturing, as we started making products in the USA, which were ideally suited to our market. This technology was quickly adopted by Austria, who started building it into several product lines of their own. Today, more than half a dozen different Dewetron products made on both sides of the ocean utilize this important technology. American ingenuity strikes again! Our DA-120 was chosen by NASA Tech Briefs as the product of the month in December 2004, and we were honored to be a Product of the Year Finalist.

2005 - started providing NIST traceable calibration services
In 2005 we invested in a Fluke calibrator and the METCAL system, mirroring the systems used by Dewetron in Europe. This was critical in allowing us to provide the same level of calibration of our own products, as well the ability to calibrate our products under hire by our customers.

2006 - introduction of the DEWE-3100 “Dewe notebook”
In 2006 we innovated again, bringing our battery powered data acquisition system down to a smaller form factor, and creating the world’s first industrial/military grade ruggedized computer which has hot-swappable batteries, an upgradeable motherboard, and a full length PCI slot inside. This time we won NASA Tech Brief’s product of the month and YEAR, which was very exciting for a company which had just started manufacturing products two years earlier. Dewetron’s chief engineer Greg Doucette contributed a brilliant design to this product.

2006 - ~million dollar NASA contract for 25 DEWE-901 systems
2006 was also notable because we were awarded the largest contract in our history (up to that point) by United Space Alliance, for a large number of DEWE-901s, which were intended to replace aging chart recorders at the Kennedy Space Center. We also started in-house customer trainings this year, despite not having much room to do it in! Class sizes were kept small (8 maximum). These were a great success, and we have continued classroom training both here and at customers’ sites ever since.

2007 - developed a PCM interface for Dewesoft
Barely a year later in 2007, USA awarded us another large contract to integrate a bit sync/decom card into our software so that PCM data could be take directly from the digital data stream and recorded in sync with analog data by all of the Dewetron systems at NASA. This system has thus recorded every space shuttle mission since this time, up to and including the first launch of the Ares I-X spacecraft from the new Constellation program (2009).

2007 - moved into 7500 ft2 Wakefield facility
This year was also exciting for us, because in August we moved to our new larger facility in downtown Wakefield. In the 6 months leading up to this move, the entire facility, an old mill, had been completely gutted and rebuilt inside and out according to our specifications. Finally we had plenty of room to manufacture our products, to conduct service, calibration, sales, and have a big stock room. We even had a special large room dedicated for our customer training classes, which we call “DEWE-U.” Now we can train up to 15 people at a time, each using their own Dewetron data acquisition system. In addition, a small multimedia suite was created to help us make our training and informative videos in a controlled environment.

2008 - joining the Dewetron worldwide family
2008 was an important year for us, since we became a part of Dewetron worldwide financially. This move guaranteed us the financial backing of a much larger company, which is also part of a larger technology holding company in Germany, the Augusta Group (traded on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange). We also increased our space to ~ 10,000 ft2, so that we could dramatically increase the size of our stock room.

2008 - awarded $1.4M NASA contract
Also during 2008, we competed with every top data acquisition maker in the world at NASA to build a 600+ channel data acquisition system for the new mobile launch platform for the Constellation program. After a grueling competition, Dewetron USA was awarded the contract, and has since delivered the entire system and even more to NASA for the important initiative. This business set new records for our largest contracts.

2009 - weathering the economic storm with big contracts, CE Mark, and more
Despite the terrible worldwide recession of 2009 which caused many in our industry to falter, we weathered the storm, and even managed to increase our market share in certain industries by focusing on personal relationships with our key customers, and targeting our products to market demands more directly. We won a large contact from Ford Motor Company for a road load testing system worth close to a million dollars - a huge coup considering the state of the economy in general and the automotive industry in particular. We won several follow-on contracts to increase the size of the 600 channel NASA system to 700 channels, and to provide a complete CAL LAB to NASA so that they can perform their own calibration of this system on site at the Kennedy Space Center.

In April Dewetron president Grant Smith appeared on the popular TV show MYTHBUSTERS, as the company helped the team bust a myth about falling cars and terminal velocity (see the webpage and photos).

We also held our first American sales meeting in Las Vegas, in May of 2009, 100% dedicated to our sales partners in North and South America. More than 30 people attended this event at the Luxor conference center, attending from all corners of North America and also from South America.

The DEWE-3200 was awarded the CE Mark in September 2009, and the rest of the USA made products will follow in 2010, so that they can be marketed in Europe. Also in September we held our first ADVANCED training class at DEWE-U, featuring guest instructor Chris Gether from Dewetron Austria, due to the large turn-out of key customers.

Today...
Dewetron USA is an economically strong company with 15 full time people, most of whom work at the company’s 10,000 ft2 manufacturing facility in Wakefield, RI. We have shipped thousands of systems since we started in 1998, to customers all over North and South America. We offer a fully staffed service and calibration facility to our customers, and provide NIST traceable calibration services. We remain an American run company, a class C corporation located in the State of Rhode Island. Founder Grant Smith remains at the helm, and is under contract through 2017 to run the company. The future seems brighter than ever for Dewetron USA - our products are in demand, and we have the financial backing to continue developing new products and supporting our customers.

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