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Contract Systems Design

Atlantus Systems has been designing and developing products for others since 1982. We have done a wide range of products ranging from turn-key business systems to high tech industrial data acquisition projects.

Some recent accomplishments include:

Some of the other projects we have done:

Some of the tools we use:

Data Acquisition and Process Control Projects

Undersea Cables

Atlantus Systems has done several projects involving real time control and instrumentation of high speed continuous production process for making undersea cables. This has included system design, construction, and complete software support.

One project was a dedicated process controller used in high speed forming of rf cable. The controller is a dedicated rack mounted system, implemented on a ISA based process controller. It used precision position instrumentation, with a LCD display, and keypad. The software was developed especially for the systems and was a real time PID position control package running of a real time multi-tasking OS..

A second project was a state of the art continuous welding controller. The welding process controller system is used in the manufacture of fiber optic undersea communication cables. This project evolved from the specification to the design, construction and installation of a prototype system. The system was a 80386 based industrial computer, with process instrumentation, and application software controlling a 600 amp high speed arc welder.

We developed a dedicated imbedded controller on the ISA buss for the welding system, using a V50 microprocessor. The development of the controller card involved all phases of the development, including the firmware, analog design, digital design, construction and installation. Programs for these systems were written in C, C++ and assembly and included graphics presentations, data analysis, and a real time O/S.

Most recently we developed a production line instrumentation system for the fiber optic extrusion process. This project involved implementing data acquisition of more than 60 process parameters using National Instruments SCXI and NI-DAQ hardware. The data was analyzed on the fly providing operators with a real time graphical display of critical values as the line was running. When parameters exceeded prescribed limits, the system captured the event a 50 times the nominal resolution so that production engineers could quickly analyze the causes and take corrective action.

The system also provided a remote monitoring feature, providing the supervisors with access to the real time data over the company local area network.

Sleep Apnea

We recently developed a PC based data acquisition for a medical product that monitors sleep apnea. The system measures patient air flow, blood oxygen levels, and pulse rate. We implemented a real time operating system that collected the analog data and saved it on disk for the duration of the overnight session. The system was implemented so that no monitor or keyboard was needed to use the system. The system would start on power up then monitor for a start signal from the flow system. Once the session was over, the user could place a floppy in the drive and the system would sense the floppy and copy the data to the floppy.

Precision pump test platform

We designed and built a set of test controllers for the customers high precision photochemical pumps. The system was a PC and custom controller box, controlling valves, transducers, and a digital scale. This project included the hardware design (including the pcb layout), fabrication, programming, and installation.

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Turn-key business systems

Job tracking system

Atlantus has developed a turn-key client/job tracking and reporting systems for a local service company. This system manages the service jobs from the client's first phone call through delivery of services on to invoicing and posting to accounts receivable. The package is a Windows GUI interface with numerous user short cuts. The emphasis with this package is low impact computing. Users of the system can be successful with limited training. The package also included the building of the customers database. The data was extracted from a COBOL program that has been in place for nearly 10 years.

Insurance Rating System

We did a project for a nationally known insurance company to improve the performance and capacity of a very large insurance rating system. The package included user interface, policy rating and mainframe communications modules with more than 1600 assembler routines and many thousands of line of COBOL. Our involvement focused on the COBOL/DOS interface. The COBOL was up-graded from Microfocus version 1.3 to 2.5 which involved a different function calling sequence. This meant that all of all the assembler modules had to be re-coded. The performance of the package was improved by more than 10:1 in speed with a 4 fold in increased capacity.
Most recently we worked with the client to upgrade the system to be Y2K compatible. This involved expanding date fields in both COBOL and assembler, and then tracing through all of the code to uncover the  implied processes that used the date information.
We also implemented a new module into the the package that uploads the policy information to the mainframe. The previous module used a very slow 3270 terminal emulation. We wrote a Windows application that uses tcp/ip protocol to transfer the policy information. The resulting module was much more user friendly and many time faster than the module it replaced.

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Other PC based systems

A PC based system used by FAA weather specialists for pilot briefing. The system provides instant access to over 300 weather maps with automatic updates over a local area network distribution. The weather briefing system is a multiple PC installation with support for WX radar, GOES satellite, and Difax weather maps. The system processes the satellite inputs into images which are then distributed to as many as 20 remote color graphic displays. For this project we developed a real time/multi-tasking operating system layered over MS-DOS with a proprietary LAN (local area network) communications support for this system. The same architecture was used in other spin off weather reporting products.

An interactive video disk system capable of simultaneous access to both TV pictures and digital data. Also a Video/data authoring system for preparing video, digitized sound, and computer data for the video disk.

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Prepared by Arthur Farnham.
Copyright © 1999 by Atlantus Systems Inc. All rights reserved. 
Information in this document is subject to change without notice. 
Other products and companies referred to herein are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies or mark holders.

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