Cyth Systems: Southern California's Product Development, Controls, and Test Automation Partner

From San Diego to wherever the next build takes us

Cyth Systems has 25 years under our belt designing and building innovative products, advanced controls systems, and automated test equipment deployed to the lab, factory, and field. We're an NI (National Instruments) Systems Integrator and Authorized Distributor, most recently presenting a keynote at NI Connect, and we've also partnered with technology companies like Keyence, Cognex, and Edmund Optics. Coming alongside engineering teams that need extra bandwidth or technical expertise, not just supplying instrument SKUs, is what separates a partner from a vendor, and is core to our team's identity.

While we have field offices and work with companies across the United States, we call San Diego home. We're proud to have partnered with innovative product development teams and manufacturers in San Diego County, Orange County, and Los Angeles County, helping the local engineering community design, build, and scale so they can get to market and commission field systems faster.

Cyth's application expertise

Cyth's work in the region spans a handful of application areas across the diverse set of industries Southern California offers, including medical equipment, biotech instrumentation, aerospace & defense tech, and advanced manufacturing.

• Product design and embedded engineering — Prototyping, early-stage hardware development, and IP refinement for novel product development. These are some of the applications we're most proud of, helping innovators in Southern California and beyond bring their products to life.

• Process automation & monitoring — Advanced manufacturing, high-performance industrial control, and edge monitoring systems that need the precision and reliability of real-time controllers and FPGA subsystems.

• Test automation systems — Lab automation, manufacturing ATE, QA/QC testers, and embedded dataloggers. Essentially, if you need to automate measurements, record data, and track test results, we can probably help with a tool, a tip, or an engineering team.

• Software consulting — Measurement and process design, code reviews, architecture development, and legacy system migration when teams need extra technical firepower. Our engineers are certified in NI LabVIEW and TestStand, but our work isn't limited to those tools.

25 years, sharing our experience with the community

Since our inception, we've collaborated with hundreds of customers local to San Diego, Orange County, and Los Angeles, providing responsive support before and after systems ship. Also, being an NI partner for 25 years means Cyth has integrated CompactDAQ (cDAQ), CompactRIO (cRIO), and PXI modular instrumentation, layering in our own expertise in mechanical design, test fixturing, algorithm engineering, IoT & FPGA software, and more recently, AI-powered systems.

So if you're evaluating a product development, controls engineering, edge monitoring, or test automation partner in the region, consider these projects with Southern California companies as proof of what we bring to the table - whether you need a little help getting started or a turnkey solution designed and delivered to spec.

Local engineering teams, real applications

Here's a sample of our past project work spanning Energy, Biotech, Medical Device, and Aerospace & Defense applications, straight out of California.

Real-time edge IIoT asset monitoring for substation breakers | Energy & Utilities

Project Summary: A utility managing tens of thousands of circuit breakers had no way to capture day-to-day operational data, leaving them stuck on a reactive maintenance schedule with recurring outages and rising service costs. Moving to condition-based maintenance is projected to save the utility $400M over 20 years, with a six-year payback period and extended circuit breaker life across their fleet.

What did Cyth build for this Energy application? A dual form-factor asset health monitoring system, including a portable unit for onsite diagnostics during scheduled maintenance, and a permanently installed system for edge monitoring. Cyth engineered the embedded system, including high-speed measurements, event triggering logic, and network interfaces for publishing data to a centralized server.

Read the full case study >>

Biotech instrumentation for fluid dispensing process control | Biotech

Project Summary: A biotech company's manual gel electrophoresis cartridge casting process required skilled technicians to hand-measure five liquid solvents per cartridge, capping throughput and introducing quality variability their pharmaceutical customers wouldn't tolerate. The Cyth-designed automated fluid handling and dispensing system lifted production capacity 350% (over 1,000 cartridges daily), tightened measurement accuracy to ±0.3%, cut material overhead 35%, and delivered $180K in annual labor savings with a 14-month ROI.

What did Cyth build for this Biotech application? An automated dispensing system on NI CompactRIO and LabVIEW, coordinating five Kloehn syringe pumps through stepper motor control with Modbus TCP encoder feedback. SICK proximity sensors track cartridge position on the conveyor and trigger synchronized dispensing, while a custom LabVIEW interface lets operators select preset gel formulations or enter manual measurements. The full assembly, including pump housings, is built into a custom aluminum-and-fiberglass fixture.

Read the full case study >> 

ATE solution for medical device PCBAs and product assembly test | Medical Devices

Project Summary: A medical device manufacturer needed complete functional test coverage across six PCBAs and final assembly for an FDA-regulated patient monitoring device, including RF validation for its wireless interface. The test solution minimized capital costs through shared instrumentation across DUTs, cut engineering and maintenance effort through common code, and kept the program on schedule for factory acceptance testing and FDA compliance.

What did Cyth build for this Medical Device application? A comprehensive functional test platform built around PXI modular instrumentation, LabVIEW, and TestStand, that helps uphold the manufacturer's quality controls and FDA compliance. Cyth consolidated the six PCBAs in the final product into three bed-of-nails fixtures and two test enclosures, one of which incorporated an RF Faraday enclosure for validating wireless signal strength and power mode transitions across the ISM band. We were able to cut down the delivery timeline by leveraging our PCBACheck ATE starter design.

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Propulsion test sled with DAQ and closed-loop control | Aerospace & Defense

Project Summary: A global engineering services firm needed a turnkey data acquisition and valve control system for a defense customer's rocket sled program — synchronizing signals across an enormous frequency range while meeting safety-critical abort requirements in a sled-mounted enclosure. The delivered system gave the customer's test team a repeatable, safety-validated capability with signal integrity maintained across every high-frequency channel and operator control extending half a mile from the sled.

What did Cyth build for this Aerospace application? A ruggedized, IP66-rated system built on an NI cRIO-9047 controller with an NI-9149 Ethernet expansion chassis, synchronizing 48 channels of mixed sensor types — thermocouples, RTDs, 4–20 mA pressure and position sensors, tri-axis accelerometers, and 250 kHz high-frequency pressure transducers. A single LabVIEW state machine coordinates nine solenoid valves and two proportional motorized valves, with redline abort logic split across the cRIO's real-time and FPGA layers and a physical E-stop wired directly to a dedicated digital input. The full enclosure came in under 60 pounds.

Read the full case study >> 

Want to learn more?

If you want to learn more about our engineering service areas, check out these pages for more detail:

• Test & measurement automation

• Precision automation & monitoring

• Embedded design & product engineering

• LabVIEW+ software development

For an overview of the technologies we build with:

• Data acquisition platform

• Test instrumentation

• Real-time controllers

• Embedded design platforms

Schedule a 1:1 call with an engineer >>