Spec sheets for truss assembly machinery describe the press: tonnage, roller diameter, table length. They say less about the software, yet on an automated table the software decides where the pucks go, where the truss sits, how much of the table is in use, and what happens when the next truss does not fit. [For all images, See PDF or View in Full Issue.]
Where the Time Goes
On a manual table, setting up a truss means reading the drawing, measuring off to each joint and setting pucks along the rails with a tape and a chalk line. For a run of identical trusses, that is done once. For a schedule of one-offs, it is done for every truss, and every measurement is a chance to be wrong.
Setup is also where experience concentrates. Knowing which heel to lock first, how much camber to allow on a scissors truss, where a long truss will and will not fit: this sits with one or two people on a shift. In a recent survey of US manufacturers, nearly four in five named labor availability as their biggest external challenge.* When that pressure reaches a truss plant, setup knowledge is among the hardest things to replace.
* CADDi, 2026 Manufacturing Outlook Study, conducted with SME and Mercury Research LLC, fall 2025. Of 195 US manufacturing professionals at management level or above, nearly 80% identified labor availability as their biggest external challenge.
What the Software has to Solve
- Setup. The first job is to take setup out of the tape measure and into the design file, so the pucks position themselves from the truss geometry and the operator selects the truss rather than measuring it.
- The table constraints. A fixed jig station is a fixed size. Trusses shorter than it leave surface unused; trusses longer than it cannot be built there. On a long table split between two stations, rails belong to one side or the other, and a truss that needs a few more rails than its station owns is stuck.
- Placement. Fully automatic placement is fast, but operators sometimes need to override it: a heel on a particular line, or a truss hard against the one already on the table.
- Training. When each assembly machine runs its own software, an operator trained on one table is not trained on the next, and a plant that adds a machine has to train its crew again.
How TandemOne Handles It
TandemOne is the software we build in-house for Spida machinery. When a truss is loaded, the software checks it against the table first: span, height, member thickness, and whether the plates it calls for are stocked. The pucks then run out along their rails to positions calculated from the truss geometry, each placed where it bears on a member without fouling another.
Camber is handled per rail: the software reads the design camber line at each rail’s position and offsets that puck by the result, with the amount separately adjustable for top and bottom pucks. If the truss is rotated or flipped, the camber follows it, and the value at each puck can be shown on screen. If the table has a laser projector, members and plates are drawn on the lumber.
By default, the truss lands where it costs the least rail travel. The operator can override that. The truss can be snapped to the left or right heel, the apex, the table center or either edge, or to a reference mark the operator has placed on the bed. It can be loaded from the left or the right, mirrored end for end, flipped, rotated about a point, or dragged freely, with the software keeping it on the bed and clear of any other truss. The last alignment can be remembered and applied to the next truss.
On a standalone table, more than one truss can be on the bed at once, and the software finds the gap for each. Rail sharing deals with the boundary between stations. On a long table running two TandemOne stations, each owns a range of rails and can see on screen who owns the rest. A truss that reaches past its station’s last rail requests the rails it needs. The other station sees the exact range and a yes or no prompt. Released rails behave as the requesting station’s own and are handed back the same way. If the other station is unattended, a force takeover claims them without waiting. Ownership is command rights only: nothing moves on handover, and any puck motion still needs a confirmation prompt. A rail with a fault can be switched out of service while the rest of the table keeps running.
Where a joint would sit over a rail, an ejector, or a walkway, the screen flags that a bridge is needed before pressing. Each completed truss is reported with its members, its plates, and the time it spent on the table.
One Application, Three Machines
The same application runs the jig stations on the TrussMaker, the Roller Plant, and the GlideAway – a modern touchscreen interface throughout. The operator taps a truss to load it, drags it to where it should sit, taps a rail to request it, and answers a yes or no prompt when a decision is needed. The everyday actions are a handful of gestures, and they are the same on every machine.
That keeps training short. At a recent installation for a new customer, a sixteen-year-old new hire was running the jig station unsupervised after three to four hours, and a plant that adds a machine carries its crew’s training with it. It also narrows maintenance risk: there is one codebase to test, and a fault found and fixed on a GlideAway station is fixed on every Roller Plant station in the same release.
Seeing It
TandemOne runs in a simulated environment without machine hardware. That lets us demonstrate it with a plant’s own job files, and lets operators learn the screen before a machine is installed. To arrange a demonstration, contact the Spida sales team.