About Granite Devices
"In 2006 I needed servo drives but I was surrounded by the cumbersome or inflexible choices on the market. I saw it better to build my own." - Tero Kontkanen, co-founder of Granite Devices
Granite Devices in a nuthshell
We are known from two distinguishable branches
Industrial motor drives branch
The core business of Granite Devices involves development and competence in electric motor drives and controls. The current focus is in miniature servo motor drives, such as IONI. Granite Devices also designs and licenses custom embeddable drives. For instance an e-bike motor drive solution for revolutionary Revonte bikes.
Sim racing equipment branch
Granite Devices' excellence in high-end torque controllers and a strong will to serve their customers has sparked a separate branch for professional sim racers. Granite Devices sim racing products are known as Simucube. Read more at simucube.com.
The whole story
From the very beginning to present day
Granite Devices' story begins from the enthusiastic hobby project of our co-founder, Kontkanen Tero, M.Sc. (Tech.). Kontkanen had a project to build a seriously performing CNC mill/router. By chance, he came by a set of very nice AC servo motors but lacked suitable servo drives. After realizing that the affordable and available choices were too limited, or simply unsuitable for the enthusiastic project, Kontkanen continued digging deeper to the inner workings of a servo motor. After a while he realized that a fully competent AC servo control was attainable with just a handful of the newest electric components by the help of sophisticated real-time algorithms.
This idea led to a year long project to accomplish a simple yet fully capable AC servo motor drive with state of the art high bandwidth field oriented control (FOC). As the project gained plenty of followers living in the same situation, and as it would have been pity to keep it all by him self, he started producing the drives available to anyone in the world at a fair price.
Since one of base philosophies of founder's work was to make things rock solid reliable, and flawless in operation, the name Granite Devices was chosen. The basis for all doing was the focus on robustness and essentials without needing wasteful designs.
So far the chosen path has been proven fruitful, and Granite Devices has gained a solid global follower & customer base. Granite Devices' creations are being used in over 55 countries spread over all continents.
As of today, the original founders of Granite Devices are still personally in charge of inspiring the creation of enthusiastic designs and thriving to exceed customer's expectations.
The Simucube branch
Granite Devices' excellence in smooth and fast torque controllers, as well as open-source friendliness, sparked an widespread demand of Granite Devices motor drives in professional sim racing e-sports community. Circa 2017 ARGON and IONI drives were the most popular choice in force feedback steering wheel open-source and professional OEMs communities.
As Granite Devices spirit heavily leans towards customer service, the first Simucube product was developed in order to aid the sim racing customers. Lear more about Simucube development, see Simucube Tech web site.
As of now, Simucube has grown as separate business branch known not only from force feedback wheels, but also many other related industrial grade devices. Learn more at Simucube.com.
How we tick
"Granite Devices has been built around employees lives, not the other way around where employees have built lives around the company. "
- Tero Kontkanen, co-founder
We are the happy Granite family
We are driven by human values. Our primary product is quality of life, affecting people inside and outside of company. Our daily habits focus on enhancing team cohesion, respecting one’s opinion and supporting employee's well being. Our shareholders (who are the employees) believe that happy employees make happy customers, happy customers make happy shareholders.
We also take great pride from our creations. The quality of work is a contributing factor to our team's and our customers' satisfaction and mental well-being. Therefore we hire only people who are persistent, self-motivated, take ownership of their work, respect other people's opinions, and are driven by curiosity and challenge. We value self-acquired skills as well as formal education. Read more about how it feels to be a Granitian.
The products we do are designed not interfere with the said primary values.
The mission
The dream team we have, shares one common Granite mindset: whatever we design, it must be absolutely robust, simple and performing. This not only eliminates waste and frustration, but also makes user's and designer's lives happier in the long run. To get the idea, just look at the beauty and simplicity of IONI motor drive, or Simucube product family.
Where we are focusing
Granite Devices is known from unusually high value of their motor control products and services. Granite Devices is entitled to establish long term relationships with customers and provide professional support through target product's life cycle.
Granite Devices motor drive offerings are not limited to the catalog. If the solution calls for special treatment, Granite Devices is open minded to evaluate the possibility of tailor made solutions.
We strive to serve customers the best possible ways prior and after sales covering the whole lifetime of target application. Customer is never left struggling, the most demanding technical questions are directly answered by product design engineers to guarantee the most experienced support.
Keeping our planet habitable
People at Granite Devices are concerned about Earth's sustainability, and the impact we have on our only planet. This is steering our interests and daily work. We believe we're doing the right thing by optimizing products for minimal material usage, maximal energy efficiency and life time. Not to forget our deep desire to see everything on Earth to be driven by power efficient, long lasting and performing motors - the electric motors.
How we are building the utopian mission in practice?
Perhaps our most widely affecting way of contributing to the utopian human values and green future is the indirect positive influence on the culture and markets around us. Examples of the ways we are pushing boundaries:
- By supplying high-end, durable and ecological products in market, we are boosting the market demand for such quality products. Healthy market demand for such items encourage our competitors to improve their quality as well, which is well aligned with our planet-friendly mission. Our impact on this has been clearly observable in the racing simulator consumer market after the release of Simucube.
- Our human centric company culture is raising the bar on what working class people are expecting from their employers. This is motivating our competitor companies to develop their employer cultures in order to stay competitive in the employee market.
Not to forget the direct impact we have made to the quality of live of Granite employees, or the customers who enjoy the well-thought products.