Kestrel Radar Sensors

Practicalities

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.

Talking machines

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 Internet

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!

Bits and Bytes

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:

1. They’re readable without any special tools, you have the option of using the raw data in your own tools.
2. They’re almost immune to corruptions, a single byte corruption in a human readable file simply means that the line that contains the corruption is the only one affected, it’s trivial to ignore that data.  A single byte corruption in a binary format could render the entire dataset invalid and you won’t know until you’ve downloaded all the data and then either been informed that the data is corrupt or the import application crashes.

Bliss

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.

Pick and Mix

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.

Feed Me!

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!

Bits and Bobs!

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!

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.