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PUBLICATIONS
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For Design and development capabilities please visit our CAPABILITIES page For over 30 years we have been involved with product, system and instrument development where we have been required to use some sort of computer or computer controlled system. This has directed us to slowly evolve, or to say the least, be assimilated to its dependency which allowed us the ease of recording past experiences, designs, etc.,hence, cognitive intellectual knowledge. This educational-experience is without doubt the most expensive throughout the companies career and still holds its ground. After spending many hours programming in assembly on a Nova Series, PDP series, Motorola 6800 and 8080 micros, the jump to the IBM PC was easy. Designing and developing peripherals along with writing drivers lead us to purchase the state of the art in desktop computing. However as most new developers will eventually learn, If it is not broke, don't fix it. The largest capitol investment was the transition to Windows, I bet you could have guessed that. The development systems we are using today evolved from a 640K DRAM PC with four 360K floppy drives all the way to a Dual P-III 866MHz with 1 GIG SDRAM and a 100 Gig of storage locally and 150 Gig of storage on the main office server which is another Dual P-II 300MHz with 512Meg SDRAM. which is now obsolete before I even finish talking about it; However, for our needs for data storage, this system is still efficient. Graphics went from dual monitors, 640x320 CGA and MGA to 256Meg AGP ATI 9200 connected to a 21" 1600x1200 pixel monitor under Windows 2000 sp4. For those who are starting out in CAD arena, the more pixels the better. A maximum of 21" high resolution monitor is Ideal. I have used flat screens with 1280x1024 19" and was not happy with the performance. However the 24"x19" from Apple Computer has 1900x1600 and is really efficient but bears a tag over $1000.00. That will drop in time and that is the next upgrade for development. Evolution from simple text based hard covered manuals have been replaced by level sensitive on-line help manuals at the click of a mouse or touch of a screen and they are here to stay. The issues for the free thinker and entrepreneur is how do we get the most out of the software we purchase and be backwards compatible so that previous information developed using older packages will be available for linking in the current package. The other issues are web server and web browser compatibilities. During the development of this site I found out that the pages displayed varied from browser to browser as well as release levels within the same browser. This web site is being updated on a regular basis and we are attempting to test this site using several of the top browsers and technology. At present we are still working out some of the bugs in web development and various browser philosophies. The browser plug-ins that are required to view this site are the FLASH, SHOCKWAVE, QUICKTIME, MEDIAPLAYER. If you require one of the plug-ins for your browser, a window will pop up and ask if you want to automatically install it, you will then be linked to the suppliers site for the downloading or automatic installation, your choice. Presently this site has been tested with Internet Explorer 5.0 and 6.x and Mozilla 1.3b http://www.mozilla.org browsers. For those that have many platforms to handle, I suggest Mozilla which supports Unix, Linux, Windows and other platforms. This web site is set up to be proportional to the screen resolution the user has set, however for best results a screen resolution of 1024x768 and above are suggested. Several software programs were used to create these presentation and are listed below. I am sure that in time these packages will be outdated as well, however for the last five plus years they have been very stable. Keep in mind that I did upgrade some of this software only to a point that it had all the basic functionality as previous releases. The next upgrade for this software will require me to change from Windows NT 4.0 to a different
operating system. The latest upgrade was from Visio 5.0 to MS Visio Professional 2002. Act for the database of suppliers for components Although all of these program packages combined appear to be many to use for one application and cumbersome to maneuver, they are all integrated within one expensive windows environment allowing communications through that environment to ease handling or data. Over the years I have found that no one program has all the functionality and be comfortable to work with. For those who are starting to develop an engineering publication format, it would be easier to start one main program and deal with the inconsistencies and some limitations until you become more familiar with the format that works best for you. All the analysis and presentation could be done with-in MathCAD itself, which by the way is what I did for the initial engineering analysis then requests for publication allowed me to address other issues. The only external package to help the cross platform issue is the PDF file maker. For my internal and corporate publications I was guided to put this publication format together which led to a full HTML presentation package. This forced the evaluation of several HTML editors. As an engineer and not a "WEB developer", I wanted something that I could easily learn and apply immediately with many bells and whistles. My selection was Namo WebEdit 5.0 and I created this web site with it. It should be considered that most companies today use a web server internally for communications and engineers will eventually use WYSIWYG HTML/XML editors like they use a word processor today. Most office packages allow for HTML/XML conversion for just that purpose. MathCAD and other packages also offer the ability to save in HTML format. I have also experienced operating system incompatibilities with Ulead Cool 3d. My original purchase was version 2.4 which runs on Windows NT4.0, however, version 3.5 does not support NT4.0, just everything above it. So when upgrading if there is a * or note next to NT4.0 look for the fine print. We will be putting together a Linux based system for development next. We will keep the Windows based system only during the transition period. The costs savings is good and our knowledge of computers is an advantage to setup easy installations over the network for additional workstations local or remote. We also switched to Netscape 7.1 for the default browser because of cross platform compatibility. The hardware used for peripheral development was a custom designed 12 slot PCI industrial rack mount enclosure complete with a LCD front panel display, mouse and keyboard. The oscilloscope used to collect timing data was a Tektronix TDS7104 Digital Phosphor Oscilloscope. This scope has a 10 GSPS, 1GHz bandwidth collection range with 8MegRAM per channel option. The scope OS is Windows 98 and has one of the easiest user interfaces that I have used in some time. I have used the 754 series 500MSPS scopes but this is a much better evolved device. With a 100mbs TCP/IP this device was easy to put on the network and store the raw data to a MathCAD compatible file. The scope has a jitter measurements option as well and has a measured stability of a few pico-seconds that we were able to measure in the lab. Because of the high speed of this PCB making connections were difficult to say the least. This scope uses high input impedance active FET input type probes. Our timing diagrams show waveform distortion at the rise and fall time in the 5 ns area when trying to probe a point on the PCB. The next revision of this PCB layout will have 50 ohm termination test points to accurately measure the digital performance and limits of the design. The DAC output analog connections were not a problem since they were taken directly at the output connector into 50 ohms. Similar test equipment was used on the Bridge Test System development for calibration. One interesting factor with the test system current measurements. A comparison for accuracy was performed using both low and high current probes from Tektronix and a simple Bell $25.00 hall effect current sensor with a range of 0 to 100 amps. The frequency response of the Bell sensor stated better than 60KHz but I was able to get better than 150KHz. When we compared the two different probes, the Bell was well within 1% over the range as well as the Tektronix. Granted the Tektronix frequency range was specified at 5MHz and the price proved it. Since our test were under 50KHz the less expensive probes were selected. I also found several other manufacturers that manufactured these devices that would work at high temperatures and calibrated to 1% over the range. For Web Development I switched completely to Linux. I have a separate Linux web server and mail server that is connected to the Windows NT4.0 network with Samba allowing smooth integration for web development. I also highly recommend using a separate Linux box for development somewhere completely OFF-LINE and disconnected from the on-line network however similar to the actual environment you will be running. I have tried using the MSWindow versions of Apache and MySQL with PHP, however, by the time I finished reviewing the MSWindows licensing expenses Linux was definitely the best choice for both price and performance. I hope this information helps if you are looking for an integrated design environment (IDE) to control your company. If you have suggestions or other comments I can be reached at JT My public PGP key if required is JT PGP Key.
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