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

Good Things Come In Flat Packages....

Following the huge success of their RACK and Cube chassis, United Electronic Industries has introduced another rugged and compact data acquisition and I/O measurement and control platform.

Enter.... the FLATRACK™

The DNF-4-1G FLATRACK™ is an Ethernet-based DAQ and control platform in a 1U rackmount chassis. It provides two Gigabit Ethernet (100/10 Base-T compatible) interfaces and four front-loading I/O slots that allow I/O boards to be quickly and easily installed, retrofitted or removed.

The four available slots can be populated from a selection of over 50 I/O layers, including CAN bus, ARINC-429, analog input boards, analog output boards, digital I/O interfaces for logic and real-world signal levels, counters and timers and quadrature encoder inputs. The list goes on….

You can also choose AC or DC powered versions of the DNF-4-1G. The DC version requires a DC power source between 9 and 36 Volts. The AC unit operates from 100 to 240 VAC, from 50 to 60 Hz.

And of course, no system is complete without software. The DNF-4-1G FLATRACK is supported by all popular Windows, Linux, Vista, and real-time operating systems (RTOS), and the UEIDAQ Framework (included with the rack) provides a simple and universal API layer to support all common programming languages.


The DNF-4-1G is also fully supported by an array of application packages including LabVIEW, MATLAB, DASYLab and more.

For more information please contact the sales team at Sarsen Technology on +44 1672 511166, or send us an email.

Vehicle NVH Testing - Automotive April from Sarsen Technology!

Noise, vibration and harshness (NVH), also known as noise and vibration (NV) is the study and modification of the noise and vibration characteristics of vehicles, particularly cars and trucks.

There are many sources of noise in a vehicle, including the engine, driveline, tyre contact patch and road surface, brakes, and wind. Noise from cooling fans, or the HVAC, alternator, and other engine accessories is also fairly common.

There are three principal means of improving NVH:

1. Reducing the source strength, as in making a noise source quieter with a muffler, or improving the balance of a rotating mechanism 
2. Interrupting the noise or vibration path, with barriers (for noise) or isolators (for vibration) 
3. Absorption of the noise or vibration energy, as for example with foam noise absorbers, or tuned vibration dampers.

Specific methods for improving NVH include the use of tuned mass dampers, sub-frames, balancing, modifying the stiffness or mass of structures, retuning exhausts and intakes, modifying the characteristics of elastomeric isolators, adding sound deadening or absorbing materials, or using active noise control. In some circumstances, substantial changes in vehicle architecture may be the only way to cure some problems cost effectively.

Noise dampening panels inlayed in a car bonnet

The UEI Cube is an ideal measurement platform for in-vehicle automobile NVH testing. The Cube is small, rugged and runs off any power supply between 9 and 36 VDC. This combination makes it easy to “bury” the cube in the car’s trunk, engine compartment or under a seat.

UEI’s popular UEILogger Cube in conjunction with the DNA-AI-211 ICP/IEPE interface and the DNA-AI-208 or AI-224 strain gage interfaces have been used by a wide variety of customers in the study of vehicle NVH (Noise, Vibration and Harshness) characteristics.

In addition to logging the NVH data, the UEILogger can also acquire CAN data, allowing simply correlation between the vehicle dynamics (e.g. speed, RPM) and NVH. All this is possible without righting any code as the UEILogger is programmed by a simple, intuitive Windows GUI.

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

Cytometry – BittWare Have It Sorted!

Cytometers are instruments that measure the properties of single cells, one cell at a time. They can measure cell size, cell granularity, and the amounts of cell components such as DNA and proteins.

Flow cytometers take in a suspension of cells and run them single file past a laser beam. The laser is used to count different cell populations based on the light that their specific labels emit.

Biological cell classification is a highly complex process, made possible by digital signal processing. In the past, flow cytometry and cell sorting systems have used complex, custom analog circuitry that has remained unchanged for years. BittWare has worked with customers to develop systems that use both DSPs and FPGAs working together to provide the processing. This has created intelligent systems that also provide a high level of flexibility and re-programmability, enabling them to be somewhat general purpose, yet capable of being tailored to the requirements of specific, in this case, medical applications.

BittWare were approached by a customer with a very specific requirement. Their challenge was to provide a very high system throughput - 64 channels of 105 MHz ADC, real-time processing of unpredictable and changing data, a very high level of flexibility for rapid adaptation and updating, along with extended precision and dynamic range.

When the customer started designing their prototype they used DSP, which worked but didn’t give them the flexibility they needed. BittWare took over and created a hybrid signal processing design – DSP + FPGA, which lowered costs and increased flexibility.

Adding an FPGA to the mix meant the number of DSPs could be halved, significantly reducing the overall system cost. The hybrid solution provided the best of both worlds with the DSPs satisfying the need for sustained, low-latency, high-throughput processing, and the FPGAs providing fast, repetitive front-end processing and system flexibility.

For more information on DSP and FPGA technology from BittWare please get in touch - info@sarsen.net.

Have a great weekend!

Green Month Feature - Monitoring Polar Ice Caps with VersaLogic

Believe it or not, with the weather we’ve been having, scientists believe that the world is heating up much faster than previously thought. My driveway might disagree though.

Much of the scientific evidence comes from data collected by measuring the thickness, density and composition of the polar ice caps. And the evidence has been checked and double checked – the ice is definitely melting. This will eventually cause a serious rise in sea level.

Getting true measurements is a real challenge, as the ice isn't uniform. Cracks and ridges, as well as varying depths and density, can make accurate data collection difficult.

The GeoSwath wide swath sonar system, from Kongsberg GeoAcoustics (UK), is fitted to the Gavia autonomous vehicle, and shot through a hole melted through the ice to complete a series of short out-and-back data collection missions.

The GeoSwath features the VersaLogic Cobra EBX board, which controls the sonar ‘transmit and receive’ electronics, and generates a 3D digital terrain map of the ice by collecting bathymetry and side scan data of the Arctic ice sub-sheet. The data collected is used to significantly improve the understanding of the ice, and helps to improve the accuracy of parameters used in climate change modelling.

For more information on the VersaLogic range of embedded EBX computers, including the new Copperhead Core i7 board, please contact Sarsen Technology on +44 1672 511166, or drop us an email.



PS - The Sarsen Team have been battling the ice and snow ourselves – our own scientific measuring (a tape measure in the garden at home in our wellies) showed an impressive 7” of snow – more than we’ve had in Wiltshire for quite a while!

Analog Input Module from General Standards Corp....

Here at Sarsen we are always excited when one of our manufacturers releases a new product.

General Standards have recently announced a wide-range 24-Bit, 16-channel, 105KSPS analog input module, with 16 wide-range (high-Level, low-Level) delta-sigma input channels.

It’s available in PMC, PCI, cPCI and PC104-Plus and PCI Express form factors, and uses the PMC form factor as a basic template.

The 24DSI16WRC is packed with features, including -

- 16 wide-range differential 24-Bit simultaneously-sampled analog input channels. 

- Input sample rates to 105 Kilosamples per second per channel. 

- Software-selectable analog input ranges of ±10mV, ±100mV, ±1V, ±10V. 

- Delta-Sigma input conversion minimizes or eliminates the need for antialias filtering. 

- 256K-sample analog input FIFO buffer.

- Continuous and Burst One-shot sampling modes.


- Sample clock source selected as internal or external. 

- Supports multiboard synchronization of analog inputs. 

- On-demand internal offset and gain autocalibration of all analog inputs. 

- 4-Bit bi-directional digital port. 

- Software-controlled master clock frequency fine-adjustment. 

- 66MHz PCI support, with universal 5V/3.3V signaling and DMA support. 

- Large FPGA supports optional features such as counter/timers.

Optimized for flexibility and performance, the board is ideal for a wide variety of applications, ranging from simple precision voltage measurements, to the analysis of complex audio signals and waveforms. 

Each of 16 analog input channels contains a lowpass image filter, and a delta-sigma A/D converter that provides inherent antialias suppression and sharp cutoff lowpass filtering. An internal voltage reference can be applied to all channels to support self-test operations and auto calibration.

Contact the Sales Team at Sarsen Technology for more info.......