Technical programming

Sometimes a critical part of a larger application needs to be developed from scratch. These examples resulted after requirements analysis and were developed as modules for use in larger systems.

Recognition of items in photographs.

Working with Engineers from ZiuZ Visual Intelligence an application was developed for analysis of items in photographs. Counting, size and colour matching were used to create accurate quality control results for photographs at a rate of around 1 photograph per second. Particularly challenging was separation of items which in some cases were overlapping. Filtering, line recognition and other 2d visual recognition technologies were used in a broad attack on a difficult problem; and with success! A database for recording these results and for storing item master data was part of the development.

A SCADA - Unix Computer Driver.

A communication driver for connecting Windows NT SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) systems with an existing Unix system was developed for the GVB in the period February 2002 until June 2002 and is still in operation (Jan 2012). The connectivity is used to pass commands from the Unix computers and status changes from the SCADA computers. The WinNT program was developed in C++ using the SCADA Application Programmers Interface (API). The Unix program was developed using C. The WinNT and Unix computers communicate using Ethernet and TCPIP (UDP). The Wizcon SCADA API is event oriented allowing a fast multi-threaded approach. The use of UDP for the communication between Unix and WinNT resulted in a simple reliable Open systems interface. Extensive testing has resulted in a robust high performance driver with extensive and well-documented error handling. Included are support for redundancy and tuning with adjustable parameters.