Dave Shaw - Blue Button Technologies industrial automation company

Dave Shaw

Founder of Blue Button

Originally from England, now residing in BC Canada, Dave founded Blue Button while developing a robotic arm assist for paraplegics in wheelchairs.  Frustrated with the limited capabilities of affordable PLC's especially with respect to motor control, Dave eventually took all his development on this project and rolled it into Blue Button's line of NetPLC's.

With an aim of providing flexibility Dave split the technology developed into modules of the current format.  Realizing the potential use went far beyond Dave's wheelchair robotic assist arm, and into diverse and dispersed monitoring and control applications. Dave has applied his many years of system design expertise to create ChamNet, to link local and remote intelligent modules to the Brain modules by RS485, LoRa long range wireless, and internet. In doing so he has created the hardware equivalent of C++ objects with properties, methods and Event Messaging.  The series of Smart modules now look 'like' C++ objects to the user's code in the Controller module. All messaging is handled transparently by ChamNet, which resides in the Controller CPU's 2nd core.  Smart module originated Event Messages effectively create an Event Driven Environment which obviates polling.  ChamNet simulates a multithreaded environment by the linking these messages to functions.

After many years behind the scenes, and after many restarts to ensure products were affordable, the Chameleon series of NetPLC's has been launched.  The Controllers with various processors, to suit developers preferences, are easy to program using the Arduino IDE or other platforms.  These and many types of motor control modules.

Dave and his team sincerely hope that you can use these products to realize your dreams with the same passion with which they were created.