Why should Daniel Gilstrap design your control system?

Daniel Gilstrap is an international automation control system design consultant. His specialty since 1977 has been designing systems that take the wishes of a client and turn them into reality. While that may seem like a pretty tall order, most everything anyone could want is available in one form or another today (with the unfortunate exception of world peace and defying the laws of physics as we know them today. Wait till tomorrow!). Where a production piece is unavailable, custom hardware and software can be designed.

We have worked on projects in Europe, the Middle East, and all over the U.S., including some major proof of concept projects for utilities and manufacturers. We have years of experience in finding and designing solutions to our client's every need. We also have close ties to other consultants, utilities, and manufacturers R&D departments that allow us access to services and facilities unavailable to most other firms.

We design overall control systems that integrate all the individual control systems in a building into a single system that passes relevant information among all the systems. This allows a simple thing like the last person leaving a room to cause the lights and audio video equipment in that room to automatically turn off. When the room is unoccupied for a preset period, the Climate controls would automatically be adjusted to save both energy and wear on equipment.

While these seem like simple tasks for the person to do as they leave, most people don't. It requires interaction with three separate systems, lighting, audio video, and Climate control. The automation control takes three required actions and changes it to one… the person leaves the room. This is an exceedingly simple example, but it illustrates the concept of what we do.

We confer with our clients to determine their level of comfort with technology and design user interfaces for the systems that can change the forty or so steps it commonly takes to start up a high end home theater or video teleconferencing system into the push of one button. The one button could be on a remote control, a wall plate, or a full color touch screen using text or icons. We use these interfaces to control all the systems in a home or building: lighting, security, climate, distributed audio video, theater, boardroom audio video, video teleconferencing, access control, CCTV, motorized systems, telephony, computer and data networking, and on and on. Moreover, while we provide integrated control, we provide for redundant individual control in case some unforeseen event causes a problem with overall control system. All of our controls are designed so that should an unlikely failure occur they will fail "soft", that is you can always control a system or device the "hard way" (by getting up and pressing a button on the device).

There are far more examples we can give, both common and exotic, but the point is that we can design the best, simplest to operate system available for your corporate or individual needs!

"His specialty since 1977 ... we can design the best, simplest-to-operate system available for your corporate or individual needs!"