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Sealant Machine Monitoring System

Timestar carried out this project for an aircraft manufacturer.

The requirement was for the design, development, manufacture and commissioning of a system to monitor the performance of a number of pneumatically operated mixing machines, used for the preparation of various two part sealants.

During the operating cycle of each machine, the system continuously samples pressure readings and applies specially developed algorithms in order to detect and report various types of failure which would affect the quality of the product if undetected.

A custom-designed microcontroller-based unit, utilising an 80C251, in a self-contained wall-mounted enclosure, is connected to each machine, and includes LED and audible fault warning devices, as well as having the capability of halting the machine when a programmable level of faults is detected.

The hardware units are networked over an RS485 link to a PC running specially developed software written in Visual Basic which
· Provides a user-friendly Graphical User Interface for the display of machine status
· Logs the pressure profiles and fault history to Excel files
· Facilitates the editing and downloading of sealant-specific and other parameters stored in an Access database, which are used by the fault detection algorithms.

Design and development of FPGA demonstration PCI card

The Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (now known as Qinetiq) required the design and development of a special purpose PCI card and of software to facilitate access to and control of the card.

The purpose of the card was to serve as a test and demonstration vehicle designed around a family of Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) chips, with the aim of implementing very high performance DSP functions. The card was to house a total of 7 FPGAs (one of which was to implement the PCI Target Interface functionality) and 8 RAM chips.

The successfully completed project involved
· An initial design study, consisting of the matching of a range of typical image processing and other DSP functions to the capabilities of the FPGA chips, leading to the design of the card's architecture
· Design of extensive 'back end interface' logic (within one of the FPGAs) to connect the basic PCI functions to the body of the circuitry
· Schematic design and PCB layout of the card
· Card manufacture and test
· Creation of a C software DLL to handle all communication with the card (accessing of its onboard RAM, downloading configurations to the various FPGAs, and all timing, control and status interrogation functions)
· Creation of a Visual Basic user interface, interfacing to the card through the DLL.

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Last Updated : 22 July 2008