StateTick
A machine outlives the release it was built on.
Control software is not a product you replace every quarter. A line commissioned this year is expected to run for a decade, and the reasonable question before choosing anything is what happens to that machine when the software moves on without it.
This page says what we cover, for how long, and what we will not do to a machine that is already running.
What a subscription covers
Support attaches to the licence, and it is the people who build StateTick answering.
A support subscription accompanies a purchased licence and covers fixes to the version you are running. If you hit a defect, the fix comes to the release your machine is on — you are not told to take a year of unrelated change in order to receive a correction to something that was already meant to work.
That distinction matters more in automation than in most software. Accepting an upgrade on a commissioned machine means re-validating it, and asking a customer to do that in order to collect a bug fix is asking them to absorb your problem.
When you raise something, it reaches the people who wrote the part you are asking about. No first-line queue, no ticket ageing while it is routed to the right department — you are talking to an engineer who knows the code, and we stay with it until your machine is running.
While StateTick is in pre-release, support arrangements are being set up alongside the first commercial licences rather than published as fixed tiers. If you are evaluating StateTick for a real machine and need to know exactly what you would be entitled to, ask us and you will get a straight answer rather than a page of terms.
How long a version stays supported
Long enough that a commissioning schedule is never driven by ours.
The policy is the ordinary one, chosen because it is predictable rather than generous-sounding:
Supported
- The current major version, in full.
- The previous major version, for 12 months after its successor is released.
- Fixes for defects, delivered onto the supported version.
What that means in practice
- A machine commissioned today has at least a year’s notice before it needs to move.
- Upgrading is scheduled around your shutdown, not around our release.
- Projects open across versions — the file format carries a version number for exactly this reason.
The project format is worth a sentence of its own here. A StateTick project is a folder of plain text files carrying an explicit format version, so a project authored on an older release is readable by a newer one rather than trapped in a binary nobody can open. That is a lifecycle property as much as a version-control one.
A running machine changes when you say so
There is no automatic update path into a controller. By design.
StateTick installs as a service on the box at the machine and comes up with the power. What it does not do is reach out for a newer version, or accept one that was not deliberately sent to it. A deployed controller changes when an engineer deploys to it, and at no other moment.
For anything running a production line this is the only defensible behaviour. Automatic updates are a reasonable idea for a phone and an unreasonable one for a filler running three shifts, where any change to control software is preceded by validation and scheduled into a window when the line is down anyway.
The same reasoning applies to the companion products: Touch Studio and TwinTick bind to the controller, and none of them can push a change into a machine on their own.
The upgrade path is the ordinary one: open the project on the new version, run your test suite against it, deploy in a planned window. Because the tests live in the project and the project is plain text, “did the upgrade change anything?” is a question with an answer rather than a hope.
Close to the machines
What you get from a company whose customers are on the line, not in a queue.
StateTick runs production machines at three sites today, in packaging and palletising. Being close to those lines is the point, not a stage to grow out of: the people answering are the people building, a fix travels from a running machine into a release without crossing three departments, and what gets built next is decided by the plants already using it.
If you put StateTick on a machine now, you are not one licence among thousands. Your line shapes the product, and you have the people who wrote it on the other end of the phone.
The commitment is simple: your machine moves when you decide, and a fix does not cost you an upgrade.
Everything else on this page follows from those two. Support is tied to the version you actually run. A major version stays supported for a year past its replacement. Nothing reaches into a commissioned controller by itself. And the project format is text with a version stamp, so no release ever leaves a machine stranded in a file nobody can read.
Determinism, Timing and Limits — how a machine is scheduled, what is measured, and what happens when something faults.
A Machine Project You Can Diff — the plain-text project format, and why it matters across versions.