Control and Automation

Micro Magic and Alf Katz have been designing and programming and programming control and automation systems since 1980 in a number of industries.

Projects:

Myer Christmas Windows:

 

Since the 40th Anniversary of the Myer Christmas Windows in 1996, Micro Magic Pty. Ltd. has designed the electronics and software behind the animatronics and lighting control systems used in Melbourne’s Myer Christmas window displays.  These window displays have been a Melbourne icon since 1956 and are the first sign of Christmas for many thousands of children.

 

The animatronics system behind the Christmas windows is a puppeteered system with many analog and digital inputs and outputs.  Puppeteers can lay down a program for a particular window one or more tracks at a time in 1/10th of a second steps and replay them in real time.  Tracks can also be accompanied by an audio track on a CD.   A particular window display may play different tracks (and hence follow different sequences of movement).  This was exemplified by Leornado the robot in 1996 who was programmed to follow 7 different routines, each consisting of a series of puppeteered actions in time with its own audio track.

 

The Christmas window display software can also control many channels of lighting through a DMX-512 lighting control system, whose inputs are puppeteered in much the same way. 

 

The system was programmed in Borland C++ on a PC compatible system running Windows 95 or Windows 98 software.

 

Elevator Control Systems:

 

Micro Magic and Alf Katz were involved in designing and programming Elevator Control systems for Johns Perry Lifts, Boral Elevators and Otis Elevators from 1983 to 1997.  These included control systems based on commercial off the shelf vector control motor drives, as well as proprietary phase angle control motor drives and proprietary drives for salient pole synchronous motors. 

 

We led the design of a DSP control system for a space saving proprietary salient pole motor for Boral Elevators.  This major project included a number of designs by Micro Magic including:

  • A controller and local power supply for a high frequency AC (20kHz) reticulated power supply.
  • A DSP based 3 phase synchronous motor control processor.
  • Floppy disk and Flash Prom based program storage subsystems.
  • A CANBUS based elevator shaft communications subsystem.
  • A multi-port serial communications subsystem for communication to peripherals and diagnostic equipment.
  • Definition, design and development of a proprietary, time sliced RTOS system.
  • Software in C and assembler software for elevator control, motor control and I/O subsystems.

 

Fuel Cell Test Station Control Systems:

 

Alf Katz led the development team for the control systems of solid oxide fuel cell systems and test stations from 2000 to 2003.   As the systems architect and one of the principal engineers on this world renowned project, Alf was led the architecture, design and programming of most major components of the systems and test stations including:

  • A distributed control system controlled by two embedded PCs with intelligent distributed I/O subsystems controlling from 50 to 300 points of input/output.
  • An integrated fuel cell electrical subsystem designed to supply all auxiliary power from the fuel cells themselves, as well as exporting 3-phase power to the electrical grid, with provision for load following utilising conventional energy storage mechanisms.
  • Software in C, C++ and Labview running on PC’s, embedded PC’s and embedded microcontrollers running under Windows, Linux and uC/OS-II (RTOS).