Devtank began in 2014 as a consultancy and design house, building bespoke solutions for businesses globally. Founders Joe Burmeister and Tim Telford started the business after caving conversations led to putting their expertise of software and hardware together, building solutions from the garage.

With previous industry expertise and experience, we saw a need for cost-effective, robust, and flexible solutions within manufacturing and development testing.

One of our earliest customers was JMA Wireless, a U.S.-based company seeking a robust and user-friendly test system for their production line. At the time, the team consisted of just Joe and Tim — yet they successfully designed and delivered a tailored solution that met all the requirements.

Drawing on their industry expertise, Joe and Tim recognised a major pain point in production testing: most available solutions came with high licensing costs and required extensive training to operate. Their response was to develop a new system — one that was modular, user-friendly, and open source — eliminating unnecessary barriers and making advanced testing more accessible and cost-effective.

Being open source meant no license fees, no specialised training or software, and full flexibility to make it do what you need. The modular build made it easier to maintain and adjust to changing requirements. The use of open software languages, like Python, enabled users to write their own test scripts with ease.

Another component to our solution, which has stuck with us since the very beginning has been our relationship with Raspberry Pi!