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The designer moved abroad. The product kept moving.
The challenge
An installed fleet.
Mounting pressure.
An ocean away.
Alco-Safe's ALCONTROL units stand at workplace entrances across South Africa. An employee presents a card, blows into the calibrated sensor, and the unit decides: the gate opens or stays shut.
Every test is recorded — and those records matter. A failed test can be grounds for dismissal, so the unit's test history carries real evidentiary weight.
Then the product's original designer moved abroad. Nobody did anything wrong — his work simply took him overseas, and the arrangement that had always served Alco-Safe well, one engineer who knew the product inside out, stopped being practical. Hands-on support from another continent is hard: serious technical issues were surfacing in the field, the documentation had gaps that only day-to-day work exposes, and customer pressure was mounting.
Alco-Safe needed local, hands-on engineering capacity for a product built by someone else — without losing what already worked. That is the situation Nuteknix specialises in: the design rescue.
What Nuteknix did
Take it over.
Master it.
Move it forward.
Working from the board, the source code and the documentation that existed — electronics and firmware, one engineering partner. And with the takeover came a fresh pair of eyes: old irritations became new solutions.
Picked it up mid-flight
Working from the board, the source code and the documentation that existed, Nuteknix built a complete working knowledge of the product — and closed the documentation gaps along the way: a maintained documentation set, a change history, and a controlled release process.
A record trail you can trust
Because test records can end up as evidence, the update concentrated on data integrity: device settings are now stored in triplicate and self-repair, test records are kept in a rolling on-device archive, and failure modes that could silently lose records were found and eliminated.
Every test tied to a person
A new card-first test cycle requires a valid employee credential before the breathalyzer arms — including support for standard commercial card readers the original design could not work with. Diagnosing that took Nuteknix from firmware down to component level on the board: a true hardware-and-software fix.
Fleet updates made safe
A purpose-built deployment kit upgrades a unit's firmware without touching its stored settings, records or calibration data — so the installed fleet can be brought forward without re-commissioning a single site.
A product that's moving again
The updated firmware has been running on Alco-Safe's evaluation unit since August 2026, and development continues — including remote monitoring and calibration-support features on the roadmap.
The result
Stuck.
Now moving.
A product that was stuck is now supported locally, fully documented and improving again — without replacing a single installed unit.
Around 200 ALCONTROL instruments are installed at client sites — a fleet that now has local engineering behind it again.
In the client's words
“We were referred to Nuteknix while regular breakdowns on instruments at client sites were putting real pressure on our technical team — and on the product's reputation. We were struggling to find someone local with the technical knowledge and expertise to rescue the situation. Willem figured out the inner workings of the instrument and, without too many questions, found and resolved numerous problems in the software — and added new fixes and options that have helped us immensely.”
“The new software has renewed our faith in the product — we intend to work closely with Willem to unlock the full potential of the ALCONTROL breathalyser.”
Rhys Evans
Director, Alco-Safe
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