NuCurrent, honored as Chicago’s most innovative company in 2019, helps bring some of the most innovative products to life.

Their patented wireless inductive technology can be found in a wealth of everyday essentials, from PopSockets^® to smart basketballs and kitchen countertops. These wondrous devices often require development and implementation of wireless charging subsystems, which is often well outside the wheelhouses of consumer electronics and sporting goods companies.

NuCurrent bridges the gap between ideas and possibilities. As Amaya Adams, marketing manager at NuCurrent, explains, “We implement inductive charging technologies for companies no matter their familiarity or where they are in the process. Wireless power goes way beyond phone chargers - and we're excited to see how it can be both an enabling or key product feature.”

Andrew Kovacs, hardware engineer at NuCurrent, adds, “Companies we’ve worked with would often try to create wireless products internally and struggled. And then, they come to us because we can take customer ideas and design the electronics for them.”

With over 100 global patents granted and pending for wireless power system designs, NuCurrent had all the skills to solve challenges for their clients, but as the company grew it became obvious that they needed a professional solution, particularly for PCB component library management and version control.

After a lengthy search for an intuitive, scalable solution, Kovacs discovered Altium Concord Pro. “I’d been searching for something like Altium Concord Pro for two years. It really checked all of the boxes for us in terms of parts management, version control and more.”

Streamlining Parts Management Plus Easy Version Control

Before adding Altium Concord Pro, NuCurrent’s parts libraries grew along with their client list, rapidly outgrowing their existing system. “We were creating the parts libraries in GitHub, so it was hard to pass them onto our different component manufacturers.  Synchronizing with GitHub was also a pain because changes were not getting propagated. Sometimes, these changes wouldn’t get caught until later in the development cycle, which we can avoid now with Concord Pro.”

The lack of synchronization in GitHub also stymied efforts to reuse parts across multiple projects. As Kovacs explains, “We reuse parts of designs pretty often, so the front end of one project may be the middle for another one. Without any kind of curation process, parts are designated with just single part numbers, so there wasn’t any way to indicate when parts changed. Our engineers had to go back and manually update part numbers instead of focusing on designing.”

Process breakdowns drove Kovacs to find a solution that empowered instant synchronization without the need for human intervention. “Version control is really essential for us. Before Altium Concord Pro, we were using Google Drive and emailing files to clients, which created serious version control issues. Now, everyone has the latest version at all times and our engineers have joked that we needed Altium Concord Pro yesterday because it’s made their processes so much easier,” Kovacs muses.

Easy Collaboration with Mechanical Engineers

NuCurrent’s mechanical engineers particularly appreciate the ability to always find the right parts for their mCAD designs at a moment’s notice with the Altium 365 cloud-based platform.

“Having the latest PCB model ensures that proper mechanical adjustments can be made at any point during the design cycle,” explains Kovacs. “Being able to view 3D models helps our mechanical engineers because they can ensure housing fits perfectly from board to board.”

Having Altium Concord Pro at the helm has also empowered NuCurrent’s growth.

“The entire platform really gives us the ability to scale. Because we’re growing quickly, we needed a single source of truth, a central repository for everything we rely on to create innovative products. And that’s ultimately what Altium Concord Pro is for us,” Kovacs concludes.