Hotraco Agri
Hotraco Horti
Mooij Agro
Hotraco Anniversary: 50 Years of Innovation and Growth
This year, Hotraco Group is celebrating its 50th anniversary – a milestone we are marking in a big way. To commemorate this special occasion, we’ve created a timeline showcasing Hotraco's growth through several groundbreaking moments from the past. With this timeline, alongside interviews and articles, we look back at our history. For this second article, we asked Eric Hagens, Product Manager, to reflect on the start of the digital era.
Article 2: The start of the digital age
While Hotraco became well-known in the 1970s for developing analog climate controllers for the agricultural market, that focus soon shifted in another direction. It was the 1980s, computer chips were on the rise, and Hotraco immediately saw the opportunity to apply this new technology to their products. With the development of the CME-T – the first computer-controlled system – they secured an important position in the Dutch agricultural market. “In collaboration with the Microelectronics Center in Eindhoven, we took our first step towards software,” says Eric. “We were true pioneers in the agricultural market. It was a big leap because before that, everything was solved with hardware – we only employed hardware engineers. Yet, software allowed us to program the processor and simplify the circuits.”
A major shift
The move to computer-controlled controllers was a major change not only for the customer but also for Hotraco's team. “Where our Research & Development team used to consist entirely of hardware engineers, today, 80% of our R&D team is made up of software engineers, with 20% hardware engineers,” Eric says. “And that's despite the fact that people still know us for our hardware.” This shift to software was the beginning of a series of innovations and changes that propelled Hotraco forward. You’ll learn more about that in the upcoming articles.
From numbers to letters
The transition to software immediately enhanced the ease of use for customers. Eric explains, “With the 7-segment display, the user could set the target temperature for the room. It was no longer just a dial you turned; you could now set it precisely, just like a thermostat at home.” The CME-T was quickly followed by the development of the HDC. “The HDC featured a display with 2 lines of 16 characters, which meant you could display text, in any language, rather than just numbers. This was another big step toward user-friendliness.”