UEIPAC Now Supported by VxWorks

The UEIPAC™ programmable automation controllers from United Electronic Industries (UEI) offer an unprecedented combination of flexibility, high performance, low cost and small size, making them ideal solutions for a wide variety of measurement and control applications including: Temperature control, Remote vehicle control (UAV and ULV), Hardware in-the-loop (HIL) and more.

A key advantage of the UEIPAC is its standalone application deployment. In PowerDNA systems, the VxWorks application is written for, and runs on a host PC that is connected to one or more UEI chassis via Ethernet. In UEIPAC systems, the VxWorks application runs directly on the UEI RACK or Cube. There is no need for a separate host PC, though you can certainly connect one in a monitoring or supervisory role.

The new VxWorks support allows these applications to be developed and run in VxWorks. This allows smaller, faster, more reliable and higher performances systems. It also eliminates the cost of a dedicated host PC and guarantees long term availability of the identical hardware. This is critical when certifying products through CE or FDA, etc.

VxWorks Deployments
You can now make the most of all the hardware advantages of UEI’s popular UEIPAC chassis and continue to develop your applications in VxWorks. This combination provides hard real-time performance, an extremely robust and reliable operating system and allows you to develop your application in a familiar environment. It also allows you to preserve a great deal of previously written code.

To deploy a UEIPAC application running VxWorks you’ll need the following.

• A UEIPAC (any version)
• The “UEIPAC VxW BSP”. You only need to purchase the BSP once, regardless of the number of systems you deploy
• A VxWorks development system (from Wind River)
• A VxWorks run-time license for each UEIPAC deployed. (also purchased from Wind River )

For more information please contact Sarsen Technology on +44 1672 511166 or send us an email - info@sarsen.net

Wind Power Generator Monitor and Control

Wind power is the conversion of wind energy into a useful form of energy, such as using wind turbines to make electrical power or windmills for mechanical power.

The UEIPAC from United Electronic Industries (UEI) is an ideal solution for monitoring and controlling wind power generators, powerful enough to provide control for everything from blade angle to output voltage and log everything from wind speed to power output.

The UEIPAC’s easy access to Ethernet means it can easily run as a slave to a primary host PC when desired, but can take over and run stand-alone if anything happens to the primary communications link. It's very easy to set up - build your application on a Linux PC, or a Windows PC using Cygwin, and once developed, compile your code and download it to the UEIPAC. From there it can run fully stand-alone, or you can keep it on your network to provide updates to your host.

The Cube’s rugged environmental spec eliminates the need for any heating or cooling in the control rack. The standard UEIPAC cubes are tested from -40° to +85° C, at 100 g shock, 5 g vibration and altitudes up to 120,000 feet and are tough enough for the most challenging applications. All I/O is fully isolated from the controller so the UEIPAC is largely immune to the glitches and spikes so commonly seen in the grounds of an industrial environment.

In more complex applications, we have customers running very complex vibration analysis to identify degradation in bearings, transmissions and turbines. This data can then be correlated with other information acquired allowing the implementation of a very powerful predictive maintenance program.

We also have a number of customers who use UEI’s Cubes and RACKtangles as remote communications links. Applications for remote serial communications include wind farms where the system needs to consolidate RS-485 data from a series of turbines and send the data to the supervisory computer.

For more information on the UEIPAC or any of the UEI products please contact the Sarsen team on +44 1672 511166 or email us - info@sarsen.net