Software and Hardware design
- Hardware Obsolescence
- Software Design
- Hardware Design
Pragma Engineering has acquired a specific knowledge to solve very complex problems regarding hardware obsolescence of military and industrial systems.
Resolution of hardware obsolescence of military and industrial test systems is a difficult activity and very challenging that will require in advance a deep knowledge of the system and a marked systemic ability to approach with very high complex problems.
It genarally occurs that the test system must operate for a longer period than the cycle of single components and modules. This mismatch of the cycle lifes of different system modules will constrain the need to upgrade hardware and therefore software.
System updating and upgrading usually includes following stages:
- Software developing to allow system porting towards new hardware platform.
- Software re-validation.
- Reviewing documentation.
The previous stages are a set of time consuming activities and they will use many resources and often are very expensive. Our intent is to minimize developing time and costs by putting us side by side our client in all critical stages of the process of hardware and software migration.
- Objective
- To solve hardware obsolescence of PCs equipped with military boards interfaced with MIL-STD 1553A/B bus. A/B.
- Description
- The replacement of PCs generated problems both at hardware level and at software level.
- At hardware level the obstacles to be overcame were:
01 Architecture differences between new PCI bus and obsolescent ISA bus.
02 Replacement of Systran DTI-112x (for 1553 bus) board and two PCIIRO-8 (for digital I/0) boards with EXC-1553PCI carrier board and M4k1553Px module M4kDiscrete module manufactured by Excalibur Systems. - At software level it was neccessary to:
01 To update the testing application by developing a new driver level in order to support the different hardware platform.
02To integrate and to satisfy interoperability constrains of the new software layer with the testing application developed on the basis of a different hardaware architecture.
03 To provide solutions at tecnichal issues that generally occurs when you migrate from Windows NT to Winodows XP O.S.
- At hardware level the obstacles to be overcame were:
- Boards
-
Digital I/O ModuleMIL-STD 1553 Interface ModuleCarrier Board EXC4000PXI
Pragma Engineering S.r.l is able to offer a full support in designing and in realising software applications on the basis of customer needs. Pragma Engineering has internal skills in order to garantee the full product life cycle required by using advanced developing environments and specific tools and exploiting Informatic Technologies.
Full cycle of designing and developing includes functional requirements definitions, software installation and software deploying, maintenance and personel training.
The company has matured a very deep expierence in developing of:- Software application dedicated to product test and industrial plants.
- Software dedicated to data acquisition systems and data processing
- Communication protocols software layers
- Software layers designed for integration and l'interoperability between systems having different architecture.
- Firmware for dedicated systems having microcontroller architecture and multi-processor systems
The choice of programming languages and of software tools differs on the basis of the kind of the application to be realise and on the basis of the kind of implementation platform and they may include programming languages both of low-level (generally Assembler) and of high level and usually Object-Oriented ( C++, Java, C#..)
Pragma Engineering S.r.l designs, develops e realizes:
- Software applications in DOS and Windows environments both 16 and 32 bit.
- Software layers to manage data exchanging.
- Mission critical Real-time systems.
- Specific alghoritms focused on the control and process diagnostic.
- Software libraries and software driver to manage hardware components.
- Firmware for DSP.
- Web-applications developed using Java and scripting langauges (PHP, Javascript, Perl and Pyton).
Pragma Engineering S.r.l. offers a complete support for custom hardware system design and development. It is able to lead internally the design process of the product, upon customer specifications, by means of advanced design tools, like CAD/CAE, for simulation and electronic design of analog and digital circuits. The company facilities comprise a fully equipped laboratory that allows prototype realisation, functional device testing and systems performance analysis.
Design experience deals with the following realisations:
- instrumentation amplifiers and sensor interfacing;
- analogue signal processing circuits;
- power circuits;
- data conversion/acquisition systems;
- microcontroller based control logic;
- PC interfacing systems;
- multi-microcontroller systems;
- data transmission systems (wired and wireless).