Welcome to ClointFusion, Made in India with 💓
They say A busy man has time for everything...... that's fine, but do you like to do the same boring thing again & again ? Yes, i am talking about daily repeated tasks that we do on our computer. We may have time to do same boring tasks again & again, but in reality there is no much skill involved. Its not obvious that, any mind with average thinking capacity would definitely ask, how can I automate this task, so that this task can happen automatically, on its own, without my presence ?
Yes, I am talking about Software Automation or Software BOTs or simple called BOTs, which is also known as Robotic Process Automation (RPA). Its not a hardware or humanoid robot, but its just another software that sits on your computer and works like you ex: clicks and opens a browser, performs some calculations on excel. Actually, its your assistant !
RPA is more heard now during post COVID times, as more and more back-office jobs and all those routine jobs, which are repetitive, where the process of doing that job remain same but only data changes, which do not involve much thinking by the user, could simply be automated using any RPA tools available over internet.
So, RPA is just another software that can talk to other software, may be browser / excel etc. Well, we should note here that not all the Digital tasks, we do on our computer could be automated. So, we could definitely say that RPA has its own limitations. There are also many scenarios, where target software may not be BOT friendly !
There are lots of RPA software tools available now, and they do meet most of your requirements as well. But many of them are either specific to OS (majorly Windows) and are resource hungry. And also, they lack an important feature of customization. We have explored many of the existing RPA tools, and saw their limitation as far as customization is considered, & add to that the huge monthly subscription fees, and as a RPA developer, we literally got handicapped in building a low cost & efficient BOT which runs on minimal hardware. This made our team, to think & come-out with our own RPA platform ClointFusion, which is OS independent and works on minimal hardware resources like even a Raspberry Pi with 2 GB RAM and 1 GHz processor !
And technology wise, we decided to use the all powerful Python for building our own RPA platform. Today, ClointFusion RPA BOT development platform is generally available now as Python package and Open Sourced using GitHub and offers you more than 100 Pythonic functions related to Desktop, Browser, Excel, Citrix based automation needs. We have functions for automating mouse and keyboard operations, and it works directly on the target software, and you may not even see that there is another software (RPA) which is open and working. It is, as if some human is working but in reality just a software working over another software !
ClointFusion now offers more than 100 functions, written purely in Python. Almost all functions, work in 3 modes which we call as Automatic or Semi Automatic Mode or Expert mode. Automatic Mode is the most simplest where in you do not need to pass any parameters to the function, just call the required functions and the functions pops-up the GUI asking you to supply the required values. Semi-Automatic mode is also the same, and difference between Automatic & Semi-Automatic mode is that, when you are done with building the BOT and start executing it, Semi-Automatic mode pops-up same GUI once again, giving you an option to change the values which you passed earlier, where as Automatic mode just executes with same values which you passed while building the BOT. So, semi-automatic mode is interactive and has human in the loop of Automation.
Expert mode, has no GUI and so the user needs to know the meaning of every parameters as required by the function and pass the values accordingly. Expert mode has more features & so gives more control to the users compared to other two modes.
As a user you are free to copy/paste the code and build BOT for yourself and thus free yourself for other productive task that needs your attention and creativity. You just need to have minimal Python development skills, as almost all ClointFusion's functions either return a boolean, a string, a list or a dictionary and you just need to store that values in a variable and apply your business logic using conditional and looping statements and thus build a BOT yourself & for yourself.
We largely believe in R & D and so we are conducting monthly Hackathons and Weekly meetups. Monthly Hackathon is an attempt to bring together talented people like you who contribute towards the development of ClointFusion viz. bug fixes / feature enhancement etc. Weekly meetup is a avenue to share our developments works with closed community for alpha testing.
If you are a student reading this, request you to join us for monthly hackathon and weekly meet as well, and see how you could contribute in building & strengthening our India's own Automation product. If you are a industry person, please do get in touch with us and we could see opportunities for possible collaborations.
Future scope:
1) Hackathon 3.0 would focus on use of AI for building a BOT automatically ! We could call it as Common Man's RPA. Common Man does his regular task on his computer and ClointFusion's AI engine, just observes the activities and develops a BOT on its own using ClointFusion's functions.
2) We are heavily working to associate ourselves with Academic world mainly Autonomous colleges for an industry sponsored Automation course with 4 credits.
We thank our management at AtliQ and Cloint for supporting us in building ClointFusion ! Let us know your thoughts / suggestions as a comment in this blog.
For more details please visit : https://tinyurl.com/ClointFusion
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