Interfaces

Flairtex were used to resolve issues with an arinc 429 instrumentation update. A customer with an imperial change over for the primary instruments were experiencing glitches. It was possible to overcome these by manipulating the label data and servicing the IO queues using a different heuristic.

The company was used recently to provide a High Speed Data Link  from a legacy host to a windows 2003 server system. Transfers had to be optimized as the host was not as fast as the Windows machine. It was possible with Parallel running to have the old running at the same time as the new, so facilities could be compared and verified. This was completed out in Australia (Sydney). The legacy system comprised of a Solaris machine and an Intel Unix System V machine. The GUI windows 2003 server system was developed using Visual Studio .net technology.

Flairtex gained a contract with the Thales group to support the RADAR group as a Clearcase DB Administrator, perl scripts were written to automate the tasks & reduce the complexity of having to administrate updates manually. Using C++ with lex & yacc to produce a data file interface with the real time it was possible to complete the porting from Unix to Windows. The Host system being the Nimrod MK4s simulator uses the 1553 twisted pair communication system. The Radar system had to communicate via this interface. The documentation standard used was DO 178b.

The Company Integrated & re-molded the sportbrain web site (www.sportbrain.com) , the original architecture had been developed by the original team of Silicon Valley programmers. The system architecture had various interfaces due to the nature of the pbx pedometer, linux firewall's were employed, sendmail server configured, a RAID Red Hat Linux Oracle system deployed, a radius linux server implemented, a linux aggregation server implemented. This system has all interfaces possible and it works and its worth taking a look. Flairtex believes in this day and age with obesity so strife that it is wrong to ignore poor conditions and it does its best to work for a good cause.The architecture was changed to lower the overheads in running the system thus making it a viable concern. The system is based around an Oracle server using Coldfusion, PHP, mySQL, Perl and Java. The firmware in the pedometer had to be changed for the UK market (c code).

The Company also gained experience with HDLC (High Speed Data Link Control) serial communication link over in Western Australia. This particular application had to run at a very high speed as it had to stimulate ship equipment at a given time quantum. Due to the nature of the technology the timing crystal had to change in order to clock the processor. This sort of problem was difficult to solve in normal circumstances as the schedule was so tight and the location was so remote we were lucky to get a protocol analyzer and oscilloscope to review the captured information frames, failing to use these tools would have failed the task.

Flairtex has been involved with many forms of serial links, these have mainly been RS232c, none of which have been standard. Such devices that have been interfaced with are Remote Control Units (PDA type devices), Remote programmable VHS recorders, Track plotting of Flat bed printers, Touch control membranes and keyboard capture device handlers.

Flairtex designed and fully implemented a TCP/IP LAN Driver for the Collins Class Submarine Simulator, the interface had two different type of vendor boards, one was on the ships computer and the other on the application side which were incompatible as the ship's computer was not stimulated correctly it would lock up. The simulator had to have multi configurations with different ship computers SAAB's ISCMMS system. With the use of FTP's Lanwatch and a personal computer, I was able to liaise with the different manufacturers and install firmware updates (to make the application firmware side handle the TCP window correctly) over a modem from England to Australia so that the ship computers would not lock up. However if one of the systems from the simulator sent out a bad message (which could have been a correct message at the wrong time) it was more than certain that a ship computer would lock up. The simulator was built with intel Multibus II processors, so the Network was very extensive with up to Eight application Nodes, one per Major Function.

The Company designed and fully implemented a TCP/IP LAN interface for a Brazilian Submarine Simulator. This LAN was connected up to two Silicon Graphic Workstations and a PC, where the PC was using Sun's PCNFS system. The documentation for this was explicit but oddly enough there was a similar problem with the network cards as with the Australian project. Silicon Graphics were not very forthcoming with assistance as there was no service agreement with them, consequently the interface had to become a disk intensive file IO one. The documentation had been written to DOD 2167a.

Flairtex designed and implement a Network Test Tool for the Thales group. The network test tool had been documented to the requirement analysis stage but no design implementation documentation had been written. The project was completed (demonstrate-able) on time by prototype/testing. The network test tool is used for network tolerance testing by saturating the network between machines (point to point) using UDP and TCP message passing. It uses sockets and is multi-threaded to ensure quick response times. There is a GUI component front end using an extended list view to handle the reporting and a server/client service running in machines to be tested.