A Brave New World - Sarsen Technology in 2021

Happy new year! We hope all our customers and colleagues had a happy and safe festive break.

Here at Sarsen, we are starting the year with cautious optimism, despite the current restrictions to movement and social interaction. The news that the vaccine from Oxford-AstraZeneca has been approved for use alongside the Pfizer inoculation provides a badly needed ray of hope in what has been an extraordinary 12 months across the planet.

Sarsen has been fully functional throughout the pandemic, with the shift to working form home being made seamlessly thanks to the cloud-based programs we use like Salesforce and Xero, as well as the flexibility and willingness of staff to accommodate changes at very short notice. 

 Following a busy 2020, we are determined that business will continue to move forward, and we are working very hard to ensure you do not see a decrease in service or support.

We’re all set up in our home offices, and you can continue to contact individual staff members via their usual email addresses or on our general email: info@sarsen.net.  We are also able to receive enquiries by phone on 01672 511166 or via our website: Contact Us. Individual staff mobile numbers are available to customers and are noted in the signature field on emails.

Following the latest Government instructions, we are continuing our digital first strategy, holding all meetings and customer interactions online, via phone or using a wide range of conferencing facilities as required. 

We are able to use almost every available online tool, including WebEx, Zoom, Skype, Teams and GoToMeeting, and after a bit of reluctance from the team (looking at you Stuart) video conferencing has become the norm. Its also nice to have an excuse to brush your hair once in a while during lockdown.

The whole team is making a superb effort to ensure that an excellent level of communication is maintained between ourselves, the manufacturers we represent, and our customers during this period of uncertainty. Please do not hesitate to get in touch if we can support your projects in any way.

We look forward to working with you in 2021!

 

Sarsen Christmas Opening Hours 2020

The Sarsen Technology offices will be closed for a well deserved break over the festive period.

If there is anything we can help you with before the end of the year please let us know. 

We would like to take this opportunity to wish all of our customers and suppliers a very merry and safe Christmas and New Year.

Thursday 24th December - Closed
Friday 25th December - Closed
Monday 28th December - Closed
Tuesday 29th December - Closed
Wednesday 30th December - Closed
Thursday 31st December - Closed
Friday 1st January 2020 - Closed
Monday 4th January - Open as normal

Technical support will be provided directly by our manufacturers.

Our Out of Hours Support infomation can be found here. 

Software Defined Radio Solutions - UK Supplier

 

Of all the technology discussions we’ve had with customers this year, some of the most interesting have been about cutting-edge software defined radios (SDRs).

In simple terms, an SDR is a communication system which is made up of radio components including filters, detection circuits and mixers, with all the modulation and demodulation of signals processed by a software package. Conventional radio systems are composed mostly of hardware, and as such cannot easily be re-configured. The SDR set up provides increased flexibility and capabilities over a traditional radio communication system.

The SDRs we have been talking about include several “hard” or fixed components including an Antenna, front-end RF Hardware, and an ADC or DAC. General purpose processors usually lack the I/O bandwidth and processing capabilities necessary for implementing anything other than basic SDRs, so we support a range of FPGA and RFSoC technology which provides both the I/O bandwidth necessary and the processing capabilities needed for implementing complex SDRs, and they can do so at multi-GHz sampling rates and GHz-range bandwidths.

COTS FMC + Mezzanine card with Xilinx Zynq RFSoC

 

 

 

Annapolis Micro Systems provides both the SDR hardware and firmware development tools necessary for creating SDR solutions quickly and easily. Their WILDSTAR™ baseboards provide FPGA processing capabilities fed directly from a large suite of I/O Mezzanine Cards, including RFSoC ADCs that provide industry-leading performance. For SDR development, their patented CoreFire Next™ and Open Project Builder™ Design Suites provide all the functionality needed for fast and dependable FPGA development.

 

Sources: 

Annapolis - SW Defined Radio

Wikipedia - Software-defined Radio

Could the ACHILLES ARRIA® 10 SoC SoM be the Right Module for Your Application?

The Achilles ARRIA® 10 SoC SoM board from REFLEX CES is the most integrated and full featured Arria 10 SoC system-on-module currently available in the market.

The Achilles features an ARM dual-core Cortex-A9 MPCore and up to 660KLEs of advanced low-power FPGA logic elements. It combines the flexibility and ease of a CPU with the parallel processing power of an FPGA, and is available in three different module types: Lite version, Turbo version and Indus version

Some of the main features include a highly integrated Intel Arria 10 SoC module, 270 or 660 KLE, commercial or industrial temperature grade, dual mode as a system-on-module or FMC carrier board and dual FMC capability.

Achilles is available as an instant dev-kit, which unites the Arria 10 SoC SoM with a starter board for quick prototyping and application testing. 

The target markets include Automotive, Video Broadcast, Machine and Intelligent Vision, Industrial, Military, Test & Measurement and Medical.

Take a look at the official Achilles ARRIA® 10SoC SoM Board promotional video.

You can also take a look at the producton our website for further information.

Why You Should Consider Using a Time Server in Your Network

 

One of our newest product lines runs the precision timing gamut from master clocks and digital displays right through to analog clocks and time servers.

Time servers are a key technology for many of our customers because proper network time synchronisation is an essential part of both monitoring and resolving issues within their network. Accurate timestamping is key to root-cause analysis, allowing users to establish when problems occurred and to find patterns within the data. If devices on the network are out of sync by even just a few milliseconds it can be very difficult to determine the sequence of events.

A time server is a clever little bit of kit that reads the time from a reference clock and sends the information to its clients using a computer network. The time server itself can be an internet time server, or a local network time server depending on the facility and user requirements.

Internet time servers can use a variety of well-defined protocols to distribute and sync time across the network; the most well-known and widely used of which is the Network Time Protocol (NTP) which has been in operation since 1985. 

The Masterclock NTP100 family of NTP time servers provide accurate timing to networks and conform to NTPv2 (RFC 1119), NTPv3 (RFC 1306) and NTPv4 (RFC 5905). Each NTP100 device can operate on a local area network (LAN) or act as an enterprise-wide source for legally-traceable time and date distribution, depending upon your network configuration requirements. 

Masterclock NTP servers are compatible with IPv4/IPv6 networks and offer AES256 SSH encryption, as well as MD5 authentication, for secure communications. All models are also available with an internal OCXO for increased holdover stability.

Our knowledgeable engineering team is available to discuss your time server requirements. Please contact us by email : info@sarsen.net or give us a call - 01672 511166 and we'll be happy to answer any questions you have regarding time servers, Masterclock or any of our other product lines.

Join EIZO Rugged Solutions at AUSA NOW 2020!

EIZO Rugged will be exhibiting at the AUSA NOW 2020 Virtual Conference, from 13-16 October.  While a virtual event may not replace the full experience of the in-person AUSA Annual Meeting, it will serve to maintain strong connections with senior Army leaders and messages, with industry partners and with AUSA members around the globe. AUSA is planning for a forum that allows reach beyond the 33,000-plus people that were expected in Washington, D.C., this year.

About EIZO Rugged

EIZO Rugged Solutions offers a wide range of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) electronic hardware products targeted at video capture, processing, display, compression, streaming, recording, video format conversion, GPGPU computing, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and data archival.

The graphics and video products are based on their own GPU technology as well as that from NVIDIA and AMD. All of EIZO’s rugged products, including displays, are developed in-house to ensure complete control of product quality as well as extended product life cycles.

Since 1987, EIZO Rugged has committed to providing premier products to markets including defense, avionics, aerospace, ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance), and ATC/ATM (air traffic control/management).

Many of their products are currently deployed on several very large programs, both domestically and internationally. Whether it be a rugged monitor, customised graphics card, or a box level solution, EIZO Rugged has a great ruggedised solution for your project!

Register your attendance HERE. 

Technical Note: 300FPS Video Recording/Streaming System

Our teammates at DAVE Embedded Systems have been working hard on new applications and prototypes during lockdown. They are always striving to improve their skills and knowledge around video manipulation and camera design including Machine Learning features on their products.

This particular Technical Note illustrates a Proof-of-Concept (PoC) that DAVE Embedded Systems engineered for a customer operating in the industrial automation market. The goal was to build a prototype of a high-frame-rate video recording/streaming system.

In a typical scenario, illustrated in the following diagram, this device would be used in fast automatic manufacturing lines for two purposes:

• Remote monitoring
• Detailed off-line "post-mortem" failure analysis.

In essence, the system consists of a high-frame-rate image sensor interfaced to a Linux-based embedded platform also denoted as PP in the rest of the document. The sensor frames a specific area of the production line and sends a constant-rate flow of frames to the PP for further processing, as detailed in the following sections.

Resolution and frame rate of this stream have to be carefully determined in function of the characteristics of the scene to shoot, first and foremost the speed of moving objects framed by the sensor and its lens. In the case under discussion, the customer specified a resolution of 1280x720, a frame rate of 300 fps, and the use of a global shutter. 

Read the full Technical Note here.