Wiresensor

The problem: slip is invisible — until the part fails

Worn drive rolls, incorrect contact pressure, abrasion, friction in the wire guide, worn-out contact tips: slip between wire and drive rolls causes fluctuating wire feed, process instability, and weld defects. And it happens silently.

Why doesn't the welding system catch this itself?

Because it physically can't. Welding power sources don't really measure the wirespeed — they derive the feed speed from the rotational speed of the feed motor. As long as the motor turns as commanded, the machine reports everything as fine. But slip happens downstream of the motor, between the drive rolls and the wire: the rolls spin, the wire doesn't follow. From the machine's point of view, a slipping wire and a perfectly fed wire look identical.

And the workaround — comparing against the setpoint from the power source — fails in practice too: the setpoint is locked behind manufacturer-specific bus protocols. Integration is complex, system-specific, and has to be re-engineered every time the power source changes.

The only reliable way to detect slip is to measure the wirespeed itself. That is exactly what the MWS-2 does.

The solution: your good part is the reference

The Wiresensor MWS-2 takes a different route — the "golden part" principle. Instead of a setpoint from the controller, the measured signal of a verified good part serves as the reference.

A slip-free two-roller measuring mechanism with a high-resolution encoder measures the true wire movement — directly on the wire, independently of the feed motor, and therefore including exactly the slip the machine itself cannot see. A part with several welds at different feed speeds yields a characteristic, reproducible speed pattern. Teach it in once; from then on, every part produced is automatically compared against it.

No bus integration. No manufacturer lock-in. One sensor, retrofittable on any system — at a price that makes equipping every single cell economical.

The setup: two components, ten minutes, any browser

The complete system consists of exactly two parts:

• The sensor — a measuring roller riding on the wire, coupled to a high-resolution encoder. Mounted near the drive unit, it touches nothing but the wire.

• The edge box — a compact controller that does everything on board: segmentation, references, envelope comparison, statistics, web dashboard, data logging.

Connect the box to your network — or don't. It also runs point-to-point with a single Ethernet cable straight into a laptop, never touching your plant network at all.

A true edge device — nothing to install, nothing to patch

There is no Windows, no Linux desktop, no operating system in the conventional sense — just purpose-built firmware on a microcontroller. That means:

• No software installation on any PC, ever. You open the dashboard in any browser — that's it.

• A minimal attack surface. No OS services, no open file shares, no pending security patches, no antivirus, nothing for ransomware to encrypt. IT departments approve it in one meeting instead of ten.

• No maintenance treadmill. The box doesn't need updates to keep working — it just runs.

From unboxing to production

1. Mount the sensor after the drive unit, connect it to the box, plug in power and Ethernet.

2. Open a browser, connect to the box — no client software, no license server.

3. Record, don't program. Creating a monitoring program means simply recording a few good part cycles with the Learn button. No scripting, no parameter studies — the good partsare the program.

4. Arm it and walk away. From then on the box works fully autonomously: it monitors every part, logs the data on board, raises alarms — and, if you want, streams everything via MQTT to your MES, SCADA, dashboard, or database. Anywhere. Or nowhere: it is just as happy working completely standalone.