About Us
Tibbo Technology was founded in 2001. At the time, we were among the pioneers in developing serial-over-IP (SoI) controllers (a.k.a. “device servers” or “serial-to-Ethernet converters”), modules, and related PC software. Tibbo’s SoI products remain popular to this day.
Today, Tibbo Technology focuses on designing, manufacturing, and marketing programmable IoT modules, boards, and controllers for the Internet of Things (IoT), Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), and automation applications.
We live and work in the beautiful city of Taipei, Taiwan.
Why We Created IO Ninja
The very first product made by our company was the EM100 — a serial-to-Ethernet SoI module. A large portion of the development process revolved around designing, implementing, and debugging network communication protocols for interaction between this module and a virtual serial port of a PC. Here is the list of software tools that we had to employ for this task:
- Serial terminal
- TCP terminal
- UDP terminal
- Serial monitor
- Ethernet sniffer
That's when we realized that the existing software solutions simply did not satisfy our needs. Even though we were able to find individual tools, they all came with their limitations. Most terminals were not great at processing binary data — even when the support for binary packets nominally was there, it was rather primitive. For example, they lacked a hex-editor, a decent hex-view-based packet log, copy-paste support, etc. UDP utilities did not support broadcasting. TCP terminals could not accept and work with multiple incoming connections at once. Sniffers did not generate a live data flow view for ongoing TCP connections. And, of course, there was literally zero consistency in UI and workflow between different tools from different vendors!
After an unsuccessful quest for the required toolset, we got the idea to create a versatile, all-in-one software package to incorporate all of the IO facilities we so desperately needed in our work.
The list of our design goals was an ambitious one:
- All-in-one universal IO debugger
- Cross-platform for the big three of desktop OSes (Windows/Linux/macOS)
- Consistent, clean, and convenient user interface
- Advanced logging engine capable of processing multi-gigabyte logs
- Advanced transmitting engine, with emphasis on binary packets
- Highly modular (with plugins, layers, session linking, etc.)
- Scriptability — to generate packets programmatically, react to IO events, decode custom protocols, etc.
Today, IO Ninja offers you all of the above — and more!
Where We Produce Our Hardware
Manufacturing-wise, Tibbo does not set foot in Mainland China. All our hardware is built in Taiwan — either at our group's manufacturing facility in Taichung (a short two-hour drive from our main offices) or the micromanufacturing facility right in the building of Tibbo headquarters in Taipei.
All our facilities are equipped with modern machinery from the world's top manufacturers; the machinery is constantly updated and operated by knowledgeable and experienced personnel. An automated assembly and testing process ensures that every piece of our hardware is built correctly and thoroughly tested before it's packaged for shipping.