Second Shift Services LLC is the independent engineering business of Lowell Cady, based in Covington, Kentucky. Lowell provides hands-on support for industrial automation, machine vision, LabVIEW, and production-equipment problems — working where the work is.
Second Shift Services helps manufacturers with the engineering problems that slow lines down, break production schedules, and don't have an easy answer. That means machine vision systems that need tuning, LabVIEW applications that need maintenance or new features, automation troubleshooting when something isn't behaving, and short-term project support when you need an extra engineer without a long-term hire.
Second Shift Services is led by Lowell Cady, an automation and machine-vision engineer with decades of production-floor experience. The work is practical: understand the equipment, find the failure mode, improve the system, and leave the customer with a clearer path forward.
For machine vision, LabVIEW, production troubleshooting, and Pinode inquiries, Lowell is the technical contact.
Camera setup and commissioning, lighting design, inspection logic, image acquisition, and production troubleshooting. If a vision system is missing defects, giving false rejects, or behaving inconsistently, that's the kind of problem this work addresses.
Maintenance, debugging, and new development for LabVIEW applications. Operator interfaces, data logging, manufacturing test systems, and control applications. Support for applications that have outlived their original developer.
Field support for manufacturing equipment, sensor and network issues, controls-adjacent problems, and anything that sits in the gap between electrical and IT. When something is wrong and it's not obvious whose problem it is, this is the work.
Engineering help that doesn't require a permanent hire. Documentation, equipment support, practical improvements to existing systems, and project work on a defined scope. Call to discuss what you need and whether it's a fit.
Pinode is a purpose-built network appliance that gives a machine, line, or piece of equipment its own secure, managed network presence — without requiring changes to the plant IT infrastructure. It creates an isolated machine-side network, connects out to your site Wi-Fi, and maintains a persistent Tailscale connection for secure remote access from anywhere.
The result is that a machine becomes reachable — from your laptop across the plant, from a vendor doing remote support, or from your phone at home — without opening firewall ports, without VPN credentials shared with contractors, and without touching plant IT. Everything goes through Tailscale's encrypted mesh network.
Pinode is new and I'm just starting to put it in front of customers. If you have a machine or line where remote access, network isolation, or vendor connectivity is a friction point, it's worth a conversation. Call 859 740 4453 or email Lowell@secondshiftservices.com.
Best way to reach Lowell for a quick question or to describe what you're working with. If the call is answered by office help, they can take the message and make sure it gets routed back to Lowell.
Good for RFQs, project notes, photos, screenshots, error logs, or anything that needs more detail than a call.