It’s the final day of Traffex 2013 and we’re ready for another busy day. It’s been a fantastic show and we send our thanks to everybody who has taken the time to come see us and for letting us show off our products.
If you’re visiting the show and you haven’t already seen us, please drop by and say hi!
He’s a picture of how our stand looked before the start of the first day.
We will be exhibiting at Traffex 2013 at the Birmingham NEC on the 16th, 17th and 18th of April 2013.
Please come visit us on stand E52 to see our products in action and to chat about what we can offer you.
Click here for our Traffex page.
Click here for the main Traffex site.
It’s been a while since we first started the design of our radar technology and in the early days communicating with the devices (either for configuration or data collection purposes) meant making a trip out with a laptop and a USB cable. In the real word, this turns out not to be a not entirely practical solution, the logistics of supporting a device where the end user may be in the remote highlands of Scotland and the vendor in the sunny climes of Cornwall dictate that there has to be better solution.
Before we get to the final solution, it’s important to understand all communication options. Some end users may not be constrained by such large distances but still find that having to physically connect to the device is a pain. In these situations, Bluetooth provides a “low range” wireless communication system. Configuration and data downloads can be achieved by simply being near the device (~10m), although not as quick for data downloads as USB, it has the convenience that on a cold and wet winters day the user can remain inside their vehicle while retrieving data.
Clearly this doesn’t solve the distance issue, but it does break the requirement of a physical connection between the end user and the device.
The ultimate solution comes in the form of the internet, by providing a device with the ability to connect to the internet you instantly break the requirement for the end user to have physical access to the device.
The answer is to use a modem. Modern cellular modems are actually much more than a simple modem, they’re actually full blown mobile phones that are capable of not only sending data, but can also be used for sending and receiving the ubiquitous text message (SMS).
Our solution allows devices to be contacted, configured and data to be downloaded from the comfort of your desk, no more trips out modify a setting or to collect the latest batch of data, this saves time and money!
Because in the early days we relied on a (fast) USB connection to collect data from a device we didn’t feel that it was necessary to provide a “data format” that was particularly sparse, that is to say that the data collected from our radars is and always has been in a human readable format.
This becomes more of an issue when the connection speed drops and this is what happens when you bring a modem into the equation. In addition to a much lower data transfer rate (think back to the early days of analogue modems!) cellular modems also suffer from latency, think of this as the delay from “A” asking a question and “B” hearing it and then “B” responding and “A” hearing the response. Latency and not data transfer is your biggest enemy.
We went back to the drawing board and managed not only to drastically shrink the size of our data files (but still remain in a plain text format and still human readable) but we also set about splitting our dataset so that the device generated a new set of data for each day, this immediately opened up the possibility of only transferring data that you need. Some of our competitors devices store data in one huge monolithic block, if you want the data for tuesday 3 weeks ago, then you have to retrieve all the data from the device, you could literally be sitting there for hours.
With our system, you connect to the device and retrieve only the data you’re interested in, if you only want the last 2 days worth of data then you can simply just download that data. If you want to know what the traffic was like on this day 3 years ago, again fine, just download that single days worth of data.
It was important that we kept data in a human readable format, human readable text files have a couple of huge advantages over proprietary binary formats:
It’s also important to remember that our devices use a MicroSD card to store their data, from the factory we supply a 2GB card which in the most extreme of data capture situations allows for 20 years worth of data to be stored.
It’s an endless task to keep up with the latest generation of components and its not easy for the older generation of pick and place machines to place these esoteric parts with accuracy. So we thought “why not buy a new state of the art machine?” and that’s exactly what we did. Having had experience of the Mydata TP9 (late 90′s technology) we have opted for the latest generation of the Mydata pick and place product line, the LX10.
There’s a lot of choice in the market, if the truth be known, too much! Once your start reading all the product literature for these machines you find that there’s a technology step and that all the products that can handle 0201 and even below are expensive and give or take all retail at similar price points for the machine. So the choice comes down to what these machines can do, how fast they can do it and what addon’s you need before they can actually do what they say they can do.
It turns out that all the manufacturers start playing with numbers and you can bet your bottom dollar you need to carefully read the subscripts and superscript clues (i.e small print!) to figure out what specification a specific machine is – this is without exception!.
So after careful study we knew that we were particularly interested in ease of loading components and quick changeover from building one product type to another (we switch from different specifications of radar to led drivers to io boards to modems etc). This can be a painful process, I know this from first hand experience as changing parts on the magazines on our current machine can only be described as a painful and laborious task.
We knew that Mydata had a solution to this, their Agilis feeder system has to be one of the smartest feeder systems out there and is optimised for quick changeover of parts.
We also happen to be in the lucky position of having designed our own CAD software tool (BoardMaker3, which we sell worldwide) which means that with little effort we are able to extract data from our designs directly to our machine over the network. I can sit at my desk and transfer the file over the network and see the result on the Mydata machine web interface as components are mapped.
If you are not so lucky to have written your own CAD software then you will need a CAD/CAM front end and some manufacturers will supply this, Samsung for example, but not Mydata – you have to pay for this extra, thankfully we don’t need it because we produce data in the correct format from the source!
We went for the LX10 series machine with a high specification camera system (the machine will place down to 01005, that’s small!) so that we would not be caught out for smaller components requiring high accuracy placement, trust me it happens, not mentioning any specific tiny 6 pin BGA packages in particular….
We opted not to have things like electrical checking on R/C, Diodes and transistors based on the principal If you can’t read the label on the reel then you really shouldn’t be operating the machine, we’re engineers (in the true sense of the word) too so we really should know what we’re doing! We also went for the standard 16K speed rating, the 24K upgrade seemed a little extravagant, since its a software code we could always add that later – the camera system that the machine is installed with increases the placement speed anyway.
Can’t wait for the installation, only few long weeks left to wait!
A common question that always seems to crop up is “Why can radar lock onto vehicles not of interest?”.
Well, it’s far from a simple topic, but it’s the phenomenon known as Radar Cross Section that is of interest.
What is Radar Cross Section?
To put it simply, Radar Cross Section is how “big” a target appears to the radar. (we use the word big loosely here because it’s not just dependent on the size of the target)
In an ideal world, the emitted signal from the radar would reflect off the target and return in a nice orderly fashion with only compression or expansion of the original signal, the result of this would be a nice clean doppler signal.
However, the real world doesn’t like ideal situations and so things become much more complex. Vehicles do not present a nice simple surface to reflect radar off – they have many different surfaces which can reflect the same emitted signal back in many different ways!
If you were to take two similarly sized cars but with different shapes, both will present a different doppler signature back to the radar, there is no “one size fits all”, depending on the number and size of the reflectors one car could appear to big a much bigger target.
Size Matters
In addition to different shapes affecting the radar cross section, the size of the object greatly affects the amount of signal reflected back to the radar. It should be obvious that a truck will present a much bigger target to the radar than a small car would – this has particular relevance in the real world as the radar will lock onto the “biggest” target that it can see.
Material Matters
So the shape and size of the object helps determine the radar cross section, but there are more subtleties involved here!
The material that the target is made from also greatly affects how well the signal is reflected, metal objects will reflect the signal much “harder” than some other materials.
Putting it all together
You should now understand why there is no simple way (with CW radar) to say when a radar will lock onto an object, the pickup distance varies greatly with the radar cross section. A radar may pick up a car at ~100m but will then pick up a truck a ~200m and if there are multiple objects in the beam, then the radar will lock onto the object with the biggest radar cross section.
We returned from our visit to Intertraffic 2012 in Amsterdam late last night having spent 2 days wandering around the show looking at what the market is doing with radar sensors.
For those of you who have not been to this particular show, it’s huge! Spread over a number of very large halls, the products and services on show range from signs to traffic lights to trucks that print messages on the road – much like a very large bubble jet printer!
It’s always good to visit these types of shows and see what is happening in this market sector, we returned with some fresh ideas and ideas for product enhancements!
Keep tuned, we have some exciting products planned for 2012 and you’ll be able to see them in person at Traffex at the NEC in Birmingham early next year.
Welcome to our blog, this is where we aim to leave our thoughts, knowledge and exciting news!
If you’re interested in vehicle detection, then keep and eye on our blog as we aim to empower the users of our products with as much information as we can.
Don’t forget, if you have any questions or if there is anything you’d like us to cover here, then let us know!