CASE STUDY: Swisson AG

About Swisson AG

Swisson AG is based in Switzerland, and for almost two decades has been developing and manufacturing professional lighting, audio and multimedia equipment such as DMX splitters and mergers, products for wireless DMX transmission as well as Ethernet DMX nodes and Gigabit Ethernet switches.

These types of devices are the central backbone of both live events and fixed installations, and Swisson’s focus lies on operation reliability.

Swisson’s measures to ensure a high level of reliability include the selection of high-quality electronic components and a rigorous internal quality control. Particularly well-known are their DMX/RDM testers of the XMT series, which are sometimes dubbed the "Swiss Army knives" for lighting technicians.

Product Background

Mongoose is integrated into the “Swisson XND” - an Ethernet to DMX converter. Mongoose enables a modern web interface and provides a remote access to all of the “Swisson XND” product’s features.

We ran a short Q&A session with Claudio Botta, Software Developer at Swisson AG to get his feedback on working with Mongoose.
Here are the key takeaways from it:

The challenge

Q: What challenges did you encounter that required Mongoose? How does Mongoose help you get your job done?

A: As our product became more popular, particularly with customers working on movie sets, the installations grew rapidly in size. When the first installations started to outgrow 50 devices in one location, it became clear very quickly that full remote controllability was required. While the device already provided some remote management via third-party tools and standardized protocols, a solution was needed to access all of the device’s functionality.
Using Mongoose, the implementation of a modern web interface providing remote access to all of the features of our product was fairly easy.

The decision

Q: Can you share a little about why you chose Mongoose and the process that led there?

A: The licensing model of Mongoose allowed us to test run the product before making a decision. This gave us the certainty that the product would fit our needs and that it would work well with the limited resources that are available on our platform. In our case, since we were using Mongoose on an existing device, the portability and the configurability of Mongoose were important points, too. Finally, the pricing worked fine for us, even though our products aren’t manufactured in particularly high volumes.

The implementation

Q: What was it like integrating with Mongoose?

A: Since the LwIP protocol stack had already been in use with our existing product and Mongoose contains great out of the box support for the popular TCP/IP protocol suite, the implementation was a piece of cake. Nevertheless, it was reassuring to know that we could count on the support of the very people who know the code inside out.

The results

Q: What changed for you after you integrated Mongoose?

A: We are not aware of a single incident or bug report with our product that would involve Mongoose. The new web interface on the other hand opened new market segments and made some existing customers happy.

Working with Mongoose

Q: What would you like others to know about working with Mongoose?

A: One thing that is handled particularly well by Mongoose, in part thanks to its event-driven API, is the support for uploading data onto your device that is too big for your RAM and needs to be stored in slow flash memory. If you need to support firmware updates over the network, that’s exactly what you’re looking for.