Built by Scientists,
For Scientists

FVS LLC was founded to solve a problem I encountered repeatedly throughout my career: there wasn't a control system that combined precision timing with user-friendly API and intelligent decision-making at a reasonable price.

From the Lab to Engineering

I started my career as a scientist, earning my PhD and spending years running precision experiments that pushed the boundaries of what was possible. During my postdoc, I transitioned into engineering—not by abandoning science, but by recognizing that building better tools was just as critical as running better experiments.

Over the past 15+ years, I've designed and built control systems for some of the most challenging experiments in chemistry and physics. From atomic physics setups requiring sub-microsecond timing to quantum systems demanding complex branch nodes and conditional logic, I've worked across the full spectrum of precision control challenges.

The Problem

Throughout my career, I watched researchers struggle with the same dilemma:

• → Arduino and DIY solutions were affordable but unreliable—timing jitter, limited memory, firmware recompilation for every protocol change, and no branch nodes or conditional logic.
• → Commercial FPGA systems offered incredible precision but required specialized programming knowledge and cost $5,000-$25,000+. Worse, they were often either overkill for the experiment or too inflexible to do what researchers actually needed—leaving students and postdocs wrestling with the control system instead of focusing on science.
• → Custom lab-built solutions often times worked quite well but consumed months of engineering time and finally broke when students graduated. They are then hard to be reproduced across labs (and often even in the same lab).

More critically, none of them made adaptive experiments easy. Real-world experiments need to make decisions in real-time: "If the atom number is too low, repeat the cooling sequence with adjusted parameters." "If the signal exceeds threshold, trigger sequence B instead of A." These decision nodes and branching logic were either impossible (Arduino), prohibitively complex (FPGA), or required brittle workarounds.

What I Built

After years of integrating, modifying, and working around the limitations of existing systems, I knew exactly what researchers needed: a control system that combines precision timing with intelligent branch nodes, without requiring an FPGA degree or breaking the budget.

The SyncNode timing controller was designed from the ground up to solve real experimental challenges:

• ✓ 64 channels to control complex multi-instrument setups
• ✓ Sub-microsecond precision for 90% of experiments that don't need nanosecond timing
• ✓ Unlimited branch nodes built into the hardware—not an afterthought
• ✓ Table-based programming so you can modify protocols in seconds, not recompile firmware
• ✓ Python and C++ APIs that integrate naturally into modern research workflows
• ✓ PCIe or Ethernet connectivity for maximum flexibility

Why Integration Matters

Having worked with dozens of different control systems—from commercial instruments to custom FPGA solutions to academic DIY builds—I understand that no control system exists in isolation.

Your timing controller needs to work with your DAQ cards, your cameras, your lasers, your legacy equipment, and your Python analysis scripts. It needs to fit into your existing workflow, not force you to rebuild everything around it.

That's why the system was designed with integration as a first principle—not as an afterthought. Clean APIs, standard protocols, hardware-synchronized triggers, and extensive documentation mean you spend less time wrestling with control software and more time running experiments.