Manitoba Hydro required a special controller at the Dorsey Substation. We developed the System Undervoltage Controller (SUVC) to implement their algorithm on our new APT Relay platform, which we called DR2.
Work on GPS, Heads-Up Displays, Vision-Based Vehicle Speed Measurement
After years of very long hours and hard work, I was relieved when Vansco offered me the position of Chief Research Officer. Vansco built me a lab in a quiet area of the plant, gave me resources and ideas, and asked me to play.
This only lasted a short time, as both my personal priorities and Vansco’s priorities changed, and within a year I was back in APT – although, no longer as General Manager, which was fine with me.
Global Positioning System
At our CEO Dave Sokol’s suggestion, I dove into GPS positioning, real-time kinematics (RTK corrections), and their potential use in agriculture. I obtained some early GPS receivers and experimented with them. At that time, they were very expensive! I was amazed at their accuracy and reliability, even then.
Heads-Up Displays
I also toyed with heads-up displays. We anticipated that this would be in demand in agricultural equipment soon. I examined the existing state-of-the-art, and projected where we might take the technology.
Implement Velocity Measurement
One of the challenges in agriculture is the accurate measurement of ground speed. This is required to accurately control seed and material application rates, and measure harvest efficiency. Unlike road vehicles, you cannot just measure wheel rotation, because considerable slippage is seen all the time. The state-of-the-art at that time was to use a RADAR sensor aimed at the ground at an angle, measuring the Doppler shift in the returned signal. Taking into account the trigonometry of the angle, you can accurately measure velocity with respect to the ground. However, on smooth surfaces, such as puddles and some roads, this system will experience almost-total reflection away, and no Doppler shift can be measured.
Our solution was to use a colour camera, watching the terrain below the vehicle. By correlating the images in real-time, the 2-D displacement between the images can be estimated, and velocity can be accurately calculated. I obtained a patent on this innovation.
Appointed General Manager of the APT Division of Vansco
With the departure of the Conviron business, Ed and Terry Van Humbeck asked me to take on a new venture – creating the APT Division and leading it into the power utility sector.
We had been doing collaborative work with Dr. Glenn Swift and colleagues at the University of Manitoba for years, but the designs were theirs, and we found them to be difficult to build. They didn’t necessarily design for production. This would take our learning from those efforts, and create entirely new products.
I hand-picked my dream team, and they gave me all the persons I asked for, except for one – my friend Filipe, who was very busy working in the Vansco PC division. Vansco built us a new office area in the strip mall at 1253 Clarence, next to the Wire Harness Division, and we got started.
For the next 4 years, I was Chief Architect, Hardware Designer, Low Level Firmware Developer, IRIG-B Processor Developer, Product Development Manager, General Manager, and reported to the board meeting monthly. It was pretty crazy – kind of hazy now, honestly, as I worked far too hard during this time. But, did we accomplish a lot!
Developed an Alternator Limit Controller for a New Flyer Bus
New Flyer had a problem on their hands. They had shipped 26 buses to a property in southern California where they had omitted the little vendor-supplied 24V alternator from the Thermo-King air conditioning system, instead opting to use the main 24V bus to operate the fans. Unfortunately, at idle, the big, monster Delco 50DN alternator did not produce enough current to maintain the battery voltage, and batteries were going dead. When New Flyer offered to retrofit the vendor-supplied 24V alternator from Thermo-King, as was originally intended, the customer refused and wanted the little Motorola alternator to charge the main battery.
Unfortunately, parallel alternators do not share well – one will cook itself while the other one loafs. In this case, it’s even worse – the Motorola alternator was puny beside the 50DN, so you know there was going to be trouble.
At first, the New Flyer engineer counselled me to just draw a little current out of the base of the regulator’s drive transistor to keep the Motorola alternator from going over its rating. I protested that this wasn’t likely to work over component variation or temperature, but he insisted. We tried… and it didn’t work reliably. But, now he insisted that I was in the game and had to complete the job!
They brought a 40 foot bus over and parked it in front of Vansco, for me to work on. What fun that was, heh heh. I didn’t realize that buses often have pneumatic start – like an impact wrench – very loud and scary if you happen to be standing by the engine!
Well, I designed a module that used a Hall Effect sensor through which you would run the output wire of the Motorola alternator. We would open up the alternator and tap the base drive of the integrated regulator’s pass transistor. When the output current approached the alternator’s output limit, the circuit would draw away the base drive for the pass transistor, limiting the output current.
The assembly was a bit of a nightmare. It was a potted assembly with a hole in it for the alternator output wire to pass through. The potting would leak into the hole if the seal wasn’t solid, rendering the assembly useless. We had trouble with every batch. Fortunately, there were only 2 or 3 batches ever made!
Developed the Conviron Temperature Limit Controller (TLC)
Relatively simple in concept, this was a 3 channel comparator system based on one or two remote LM35 temperature sensors placed in the growth chamber, and two remote precision linear potentiometers mounted on the front panel . For simple chambers – those without the CMP3000 control system – it would function as a simple heat and/or cool controller.
For larger systems, it replaced the electro-mechanical failsafe alarm/shutdown system, providing an accurate, repeatable, easily settable minimum and/or maximum limit for chamber temperature.
It was a fairly simple circuit, but had to accomplish its task with only a single supply, single ended comparator chips, and one circuit board for multiple configurations. The system was designed to be fail-safe in the event of a sensor malfunction or open pot. There were configurations where its range was -30C to +30C, and others where it was +10C to +70C.
This product taught me straight analog circuitry, summing notes, differential nodes, analog hysterisis, fail-safe operation, and chatter reduction. Pretty cool for a fairly simple circuit!
Promoted to Engineering Manager, Industrial Systems
I clamoured for a promotion, and finally got it!
James White and I were named Engineering Managers. James was given half the team for Embedded Systems Engineering, and I was given the other half for Industrial Systems Engineering. Our offices were side-by-side in the building at 1305 Clarence. We worked very closely together, often reviewing each others’ work, and seconding our team members back and forth. We both always interviewed any candidate for either group. And, for existing historical projects, James and I sometimes would cross over as well.
Developing Specifications and Architecture for the Conviron CMP4000
The CMP3000 was starting to show its age in the early 1990s. It was agreed all around that we should start working on the next generation, the CMP4000.
I spent over 6 months pretty much full time working with Chuck Leibert, R&D Manager of Conviron, in the definition of the CMP4000 – specifying its feature set, minimum requirements, protocols, and expected technologies to be used.
During this time, I travelled to Indianapolis IN, where, after attending the T&D World Expo, I met up with Brian McCuskee, and we visited the Monsanto installation, discussing requirements with their staff, and getting good intelligence on where the product should go next.
Unfortunately, once the specification was completed, while waiting for the next stage of the development process to begin, Conviron was required to seek alternate bids for the development. A promised lower price, faster time to market, and pressure from the Government of Canada’s IRAP on who would get a grant for its development, and the work went instead to iders, another firm in Winnipeg. Sad day.
Bought a Hallicrafters S-77A All-Band Communications Receiver
After years of using the old Viking tabletop radio to listen to my beloved shortwave bands, I saw an advertisement in the classified section of the Winnipeg Free Press, for shortwave radios. A fellow named Mr. Hall, who lived down on Landsdowne Ave (a rough part of town now, but not bad then), had some radios for sale. I had a bit of money saved from my paper route, and convinced my dad to take me to see them.
I paid $20 for a Hallicrafters S-77A communications receiver. Wow, what a difference! I used that radio for many years, and when I got something better (a Yaesu FRG-7), I took it out to the family cabin, where I used to listen to shortwave on lazy summer nights…
While at Mr. Hall’s place, I was bedazzled by the vision of an amazing, complex, wonderful radio – a full carrier-mounted Marconi No. 19 Set Mk. III! I asked how much it was… and decided that I had to have it, too.
Worked on an IRIG-B Decoder
Manitoba Hydro wanted an IRIG-B decoder unit. It would listen to modulated IRIG-B, decode the time, and provide details of the time on a serial port. Filipe Fernandes and I did the system architecture. Filipe designed the board, based on a Motorola MC68HC11 development kit, and did the programming in assembly language.
The project was a success, but he was moved off to another project just as it was finishing, so I completed the programming. The design was a success.
This was my first exposure to IRIG-B, and I was fascinated.
Developed the Conviron Integrated Logger Controller (ILC) Card
The CMP3000 has a very sophisticated network operating over isolated RS-422 signals in a ring-bus arrangement. Each controller has a bypass relay which would heal the ring-bus in the event of controller or communication board failure. The Zilog Z8530 Serial Communications Controller (SCC) chip was used to talk HDLC on the ring-bus.
The master of the network was the CMP3300 Data Logger Processor (DLP), which was essentially a hot-rodded CMP3000 controller with different programming. It could manage and control up to 96 CMP3000 controllers on its loop.
To enhance and extend its function, the DLP had a serial port which could be connected to the Host Computer, an IBM PC running QNX. The Host computer could be connected to 3 DLPs, allowing it to manage many more controllers.
Being a general purpose PC running QNX, the Host Computer was able to schedule changes, log all kinds of data, display graphs, and export data to other media (think: floppy disks!).
There came a time when the DLP just seemed clunky. So, I was asked to create the Loop Control Card (LCC), which would mount directly into the IBM PC chassis and replace the DLP. It would be able to control 3 loops of controllers, and have embedded on-board alarm contacts.
By then, the PC of choice was the AT, and Vansco actually was making its own labelled computers, based on components purchased overseas. However, the LCC was designed for the XT bus for maximum compatibility.
The heart of the board was a NEC V25 processor, high-speed (well, for the time) SRAM, and a few PLDs, where I implemented a pseudo-dual-port RAM for control and data transfer. Internal bus faults occurred periodically, which proved almost impossible to track down without the right test equipment. Finally, management went and bought a very expensive (at he time) Fluke/Phillips PM3585/90 logic analyzer, which I proceeded to load up to the maximum, using its dual timing & state analysis to great advantage. In the end, the V25 was every once in a while stealing an extra clock cycle for its prefetch queue, causing a bus timeout. The PC bus specification wouldn’t let me stretch it any further. I was able to rework the logic and make it all come together. You gotta have the right tools!
