QiTech —and growing fast. What started out more or less as a hobby project in Milan’s garage is increasingly evolving into a major mechanical engineering company. With our newly founded QiTech , we no longer just build and program our own Extruder winders, but also complex control systems for custom machines for other customers.
And with more machines comes more responsibility—especially when it comes to documentation.
Our circuit diagrams are becoming increasingly complex
Every custom machine that workspace our workspace requires complete CE documentation. This ensures that even ten years from now, everyone will still know how the control cabinet is configured. In our early days, we often drew circuit diagrams by hand, line by line. It worked, sort of. But as complexity grew and customer orders became increasingly customized, it was clear that this approach was no longer sustainable.
That is why we are now officially partnering with EPLAN —one of the leading software companies for electrical design in mechanical engineering.
What EPLAN actually changes for us
Instead of drawing components ourselves, we import ready-made macros from manufacturers like WAGO or Beckhoff directly from the EPLAN Data Portal into our drawings. Cable cross-sections, colors, terminal diagrams—everything is included in the drawing, so whoever builds our control cabinets can simply follow the drawing. This reduces errors during construction and also helps us with purchasing, since everything is clearly structured.
It also saves us a lot of time when it comes to special orders. In those cases, we no longer have to start from scratch; instead, we can expand our base setup (e.g., the standard wrapper) with just a few clicks.
We'll take you along—right from the start
Since we’re still learning ourselves, we’ve decided to make this process transparent. In a new YouTube series, Mara (electrical engineering) and Torben (mechatronics) show, from the perspective of EPLAN newcomers, how to create schematics for special-purpose machines—including mistakes, “aha” moments, and everything in between.
So that other startups don't have to go through the same rough patch.
And because we remain true to our open-source roots, we make the finished EPLAN schematics for our core machines available in their entirety on GitHub.
Check out the first episodes on our YouTube channel —or learn more about QiTech on our website.
