Many of the projects we work on are customer sensitive. Below are listed some of the projects we can be open about.
This project designed and developed the electronics and software for a mobile drain inspection system. The battery operated unit is based around an NXP IMX8mp processor and supports up to 4 full HD analogue TVI cameras with display to a 1280x800 high brightness LCD panel and a HDMI monitor. Support for softkeys or a touch panel are provided.
The system has 3 Gigabytes of LPDDR4 memory, 16 Gigabytes of eMMC storage, Giagbit Ethernet, RS485, Wifi and Bluetooth communications. It has a GPS module and 4 USB interfaces of which two are USB3.0. Battery charging and management for a LiPO 12 Volt battery pack is included on the board. A very low power STM32L board control processor provides continuous shock detection with tamper detection and GPS location.
Microphone and speaker audio is provided along with Bluetooth capabilities. The IMX8mp also includes an AI processor for vision processing.
Our customer has an aging custom designed high voltage semiconductor test unit. While the unit operates, well the main I/O board had become obsolete and replacements unavailable. We developed a compatiable replacement for the existing IEEE488 I/O board. The existing IEE488 interface and command set was replicated with a new RS232 serial interface added to support the case when the PC based IEEE488 controller card becomes unavailable.
The Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE http://www.dunescience.org/) stores as much data possible if a potential Super Nova is detected. This will be done by writing to NVMe attached storage. Approximately 300 devices will be written to in parallel for each 10 kTonne neutrino detector module. Beam assisted the Bristol University Physics department with the design and development of the NVMe data storage system for this system. In particular we implemented the FPGA VHDL firmware to enable access to the NVMe devices being used to store the precious data.
The system is able to store 120 TeraBytes of incoming data at a rate of 600 GigaBytes per second! More information
The unit was designed to comply with automotive standards and was tested against these.
The unit's processor is an ARM based Cortex-4 STM32F4 and supports a web browser accessed interface together with a JSON application interface for custom mobile apps.
The system continuously samples 120 Analogue channels sampled at 125MHz, 14 bits and processes this data in real-time to determine information on the position of particle bunches as they orbit at around 437kHz. Overal the system captures and processes 15 billion samples per second. the multiple Xilinx Vertex FPGA's are employed in a modular system to capture and process the data. The system is controlled over a Gigabit Ethernet network from which portions of the resulting data can be accessed.
More information is at: TmsOverview and http://portal.beam.ltd.uk/support/cern/
We developed a cost sensitive Ethernet based backplane system, a Gigabit switch card together with ancillary cards for the mounting of a custom video compression card and redundant power supplies. Three and five slot variants of the backplane were produced.
We developed a system to extract and save the data from these tapes. This Linux based system uses Digital Acquisition (DAQ) cards with the open source COMEDI DAQ interface to capture and process in real time the analogue data from the 24 analogue tape tracks. FM decoding of the tracks is perfomed in real-time using FIR and IIR filters together with a Hilbert transform based FM Demodulator. The resulting digitised seismic data is stored on disk and can be written to DVD. The whole system is controlled with an easy to use GUI interface. In addition to the software design and development we designed and produced the analogue, front-end, tape head amplifiers and anti-aliasing filters for the system.
The CacheServer was designed and developed by BEAM to act as a cache for the Video servers video information. It operates as a classic read-only cache of Video Data Thunks (The basic data chunk), accepting requests for Thunks from the multiple journalist's machines, forwarding these requests to the Video servers if it cannot satisfy them itself, and storing them (in RAM and on disk) for future use in a strictly "most recently used" manner. The system was implemented using the Linux OS as a network managed 19inch rack unit.
The AstroFFT Digital Spectrometer System was designed to pick out coherent signals from large levels of noise. One example of use is to survey the Galaxy searching for maser emission from water both in star-forming regions and in the circumstellar envelopes of late-type stars.
The system processes, in real time, multiple wide bandwidth (23MHz) analogue signals from a radio telescope. The system employs the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) to calculate the spectrum of the signals and integrates the power of this spectrum over time.
The AstroFFT system consists of a network accessible host containing multiple FFT processing engines. Each processing engine has two, fast, analogue to digital converters connected directly to one of the latest generation of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA's). The FFT, power and integration calculations are performed by this FPGA. This novel architecture provides the high level of performance required with the flexibility to modify or use different processing algorithms. This was implemented as a Linux based 19inch rack system with GUI for system management.
We have extensive experience in cross platform porting.