Tractian · Innovation Case 2026

DIAL.
Tractian OEE Terminal.

Unplanned downtime costs U.S. manufacturers $50B annually. Most of it goes unlabeled. DIAL is a purpose built operator terminal that captures stop reason codes at the machine in under 5 seconds, gloves on, WiFi optional. Every attributed event becomes structured input for Tractian's OEE engine and a labeled training sample for predictive maintenance models.

Try the interactive demo

Built for the floor

Everything a machine stop needs.
Nothing it doesn't.

100M+ shaft revolutions

Avg. log time

5sec

Dial. Confirm. Done.

Enclosure

IP65

Dust-tight. Splash-proof.

1M cycle life · Gold-plated contacts

Offline memory

72h

NVS flash queue

Connectivity

Offline-first

WiFi + BLE when available.
NVS queue when it's not.

256 PPR · Hall effect encoder

Auto-commit

30sec

UNP-TIM timeout

Mount options

Magnetic
VESA 75mm
Wall

Field-replaceable surround · TPE overmold

Integration

Tractian-
native

Every stop feeds directly into the Tractian OEE engine as a labeled data point.

The problem

The machine stopped.
Nobody logged why.

A CNC machine goes down. The operator has 5 seconds to log a stop reason before walking back to their station. They are wearing thick Kevlar gloves soaked in cutting fluid and metallic dust. The WiFi in this corner of the plant has been down for 40 minutes. Nothing gets logged. The OEE report records "unplanned downtime" with no root cause attribution. The same failure repeats next shift.

C15-second input window

›

Operator attention resets the moment the machine restarts. Any interaction exceeding 5 seconds is consistently abandoned, making input speed a hard design constraint, not a preference.

C2Kevlar gloves and process contamination

›

Capacitive touchscreens fail under gloved input. Thin membrane buttons corrode under cutting fluid exposure. Exposed mechanical components accumulate metallic particulate and seize. Input hardware must be designed for the environment from the ground up.

C3Intermittent connectivity

›

WiFi outages of 1 to 2 hours are common in heavy manufacturing environments. Cloud dependent solutions lose data silently during these windows. The operator logged the event. The infrastructure did not preserve it.

C4Plant specific stop taxonomies

›

No two facilities use the same reason code structure. The terminal must support customer defined hierarchies configurable remotely, one hardware SKU deployable across any operation without field modification.

C5OEE data integrity

›

An unattributed stop event does not just represent missing information. It corrupts the Availability component of OEE and removes the signal needed to identify recurring failure patterns at the maintenance level.

The solution

DIAL, a dedicated stop reason terminal.

Not a repurposed tablet. Not a general purpose HMI panel with downtime logging bolted on. A single function device engineered around the operator's input constraints.

Two inputs. Under 5 seconds.›

A sealed magnetic rotary encoder for navigation and one oversized confirm button for commitment. The interaction requires no authentication, no mode switching, and no screen management. Two deliberate gestures from stop event to logged record.

Engineered for process environments.›

IP65 rated enclosure with a non contacting magnetic encoder. No mechanical wear surfaces, no particulate ingress path, rated for mud, dust, grease, and cutting fluid. IP67 pushbuttons at both input points. Rotary shaft seal at the encoder penetration.

Modular hardware architecture.›

The electronics core is a self contained unit. The rubber surround functions as a replaceable protective shell, covering edges and back while leaving the face fully accessible. Field damage to the surround does not require electronics replacement.

Offline first data integrity.›

Every stop event is committed to NVS flash storage before any network operation is initiated. WiFi connectivity is a synchronization channel, not an operational dependency. The local queue drains to Tractian's MQTT broker in chronological order on reconnection.

Interactive demo

Try it.

Scroll the dial or use arrow keys. OK confirms. BACK steps back. Space wakes the device.

CNC-04 · CELL B · SHIFT 2

SYNC

Device state

Turn the dial to navigate stop categories and reason codes. Every logged event syncs to the Tractian OEE engine.

IDLEawaiting

Logged events

No events logged yet

scroll turn dial

↑↓ navigate

Enter confirm

Esc back

Space wake device

The interaction

Three steps. Under 5 seconds.

The two level stop taxonomy, category then reason code, limits visible options to eight at any point in the flow, keeping selection time predictable regardless of how large the customer's full code set grows.

01Stop event detected›

State: IDLE → SELECT_GROUP. DIAL registers the stop event via machine signal or vibration input. The display activates and presents the top level category list without requiring any operator initiated input. The 30 second timeout window begins immediately.

02Category selection›

State: SELECT_GROUP → SELECT_CODE. The operator rotates the encoder to scroll through stop categories: Tooling, Material, Machine, Process, External. Each detent advances one position. Input is reliable under heavy gloves, contaminated hands, or indirect contact. OK confirms.

03Reason code selection and commit›

State: SELECT_CODE → LOGGED. The operator scrolls to the applicable reason code and confirms with OK. The event is written to local flash before any network transmission is attempted. The display presents a logged confirmation and returns to idle within 2 seconds.

If the operator does not complete input within 30 seconds, DIAL automatically commits a UNP-TIM record to local storage. The downtime window and timestamp are preserved for OEE calculation and flagged for supervisor review. No stop event is ever silently discarded.

Hardware specification

Component decisions.

Each component was selected for a specific engineering reason. Click any component to see the rationale and specifications.

MCU

ESP32-S3

Rotary encoder

Non-contacting magnetic

Input buttons

Sealed panel mount

Display

Transflective LCD

Enclosure

Structural plastic + TPE

Shaft seal

Rotary lip seal

ESP32-S3 Microcontroller

The ESP32-S3 runs FreeRTOS across both cores, which allows encoder polling, display refresh, and network communication to operate as independent tasks without blocking each other. Native WiFi and Bluetooth eliminates an external radio module. The NVS flash subsystem provides reliable queue storage without requiring a file system layer. A Raspberry Pi introduces a 20 to 40 second Linux boot time and depends on an SD card, a documented failure point in high vibration environments. An Arduino Uno has 2KB of SRAM, insufficient for MQTT, display buffer, and offline queue simultaneously.

PlatformESP32-S3-WROOM-1

CoresDual core, 240MHz

RTOSFreeRTOS

WirelessWiFi 802.11n + BLE 5.0

StorageNVS flash, ~72h queue

Idle current<10μA deep sleep

Data pipeline

Offline first. Then cloud.

Local persistence is not a fallback. It is the primary write path. Cloud synchronization operates as a background process whenever connectivity is available.

Local commit

On confirmation, DIAL writes the full event record to NVS flash in under 10ms. The event is preserved regardless of network state.

machine_id · timestamp · reason_code · operator_id

Queue accumulation

Events accumulate in an ordered FIFO structure with approximately 72 hours of capacity, covering the longest documented WiFi outage windows in CNC environments.

MQTT sync

When connectivity restores, the queue drains to the Tractian broker in chronological order. Each event is acknowledged before being marked flushed locally.

OTA configuration

Customer stop taxonomies are pushed from the Tractian cloud on the next sync window. Updated code trees are active within minutes. No physical access required.

OEE attribution

Each attributed stop enables accurate Availability calculation, root cause Pareto analysis, and cross facility failure pattern identification in the Tractian platform.

How the protocol works ›

MQTT was chosen over HTTP because it maintains a persistent broker connection, making reconnection after an outage fast and the queue drain immediate. Delivery is set to QoS 1, meaning the broker must acknowledge each event before the device removes it from the local queue. A duplicate event is recoverable. A lost event is not.

Encoder input is debounced at 50ms to prevent phantom ticks from machine vibration. Button input at 20ms. The 30 second timeout auto-commits a UNP-TIM record so no stop window is ever unaccounted for.

OEE + AI impact

The device isn't the product.
The labeled data is.

OEE impact

~40%

Of unplanned stops have a recurring, fixable root cause, invisible without reason code attribution.

Data quality gap

±15%

Variance between manual OEE reporting and automated sensor based calculation.

Industry baseline

55–60%

Typical global manufacturing OEE. World class benchmark is 85%.

Annual cost

$50B

US manufacturers lose to unplanned downtime. 70% rely on manual data collection.

Tractian's sensors capture the physical signature of every failure. What they cannot provide is operator attributed causation. DIAL closes that gap. The result is a labeled dataset that makes every Tractian predictive model more accurate over time.

Sensor detects anomaly. Vibration, current deviation, or thermal event. Timestamp recorded.

Machine stops. DIAL activates. Operator selects stop reason within 5 seconds.

Platform correlates sensor anomaly with operator attributed reason code. Labeled record created.

Labeled signatures accumulate across machines, cells, shifts, and facilities.

Predictive alert issued ahead of the next qualifying anomaly. Downtime avoided.

DIAL.Tractian OEE Terminal.

Everything a machine stop needs.Nothing it doesn't.

The machine stopped.Nobody logged why.