It is quite difficult to name valuable reference projects when working under NDAs or being employed. However, there are a few that I can list here.

Extending Character Set

The company BKW (Bernische Kraftwerke AG) needed french character sets for the electric plans.

The manufacturer of the large format machine (Benson Graphics) was unable to fulfill that requirement. BKW then turned to the Swiss subsidiary and they contacted me. There was no documentation and no help in any other form. Reverse engineering and extensive data analysis were the keys to success. An emulator to partially simulate the machine's logic was used for the development because the real machine was constantly in use.

Even though the goals could be reached, it's nothing to enter a hall of fame. The immense effort was in no relation to the value.

Packaging Machines: New Conveyor Logic

Lamb Europe was a company that mainly handled the packaging of paper rolls.

Paper rolls? Yes! Up to two meters in diameter, up to five meters width, up to 14 tons.

Among all other start-up works for the whole plant, includig ABB robots, hydraulic transporters and stoppers, paper feeders and lid transports, there was a problem to be solved that paper rolls could get removed at any moment during the transport on the floor conveyors. The re-identification before reentering the next part of the plant would have been too expensive. The solution that was implemented was a virtual transport of the rolls inside the Siemens S5 software. Depending on the conveyor's speed, a moving pattern was generated by a simple light barrier at the beginning and end of the conveyer. This was sufficient to reindentify the rolls, allowed movements in both directions and was fails-safe and insensitive to the loss of rolls.

System ARVY

A whole system for recording and analysis of driving data

Winner of the 1998 W. A. DeVigier price, the highest endowed Swiss entrepreneur award.

Hardware:

ARVY mobile device
Supports for vehicle mounting and office use
Redesign of the ARVY mobile device 2006 -

Software:

Firmware for ARVY mobile device
Communication layer on the PC
Analyzing core (PC)
Redesign of the PC software during 2001
Complete redesign of the PC software during 2007 -

One highlight is the analysis core that is part of firmware and PC analysis software. It is able to analyze recorded data using scenarios with the complex law as basis.

Automated order injecter for TRANSAG (today Scheoni Transport)

TRANSFLOW couldn't handle mailed jobs from customers

The software TRANSFLOW in use at TRANSAG was unable to handle orders that customers would send in to be executed by the company. The solution should be convenient and shouldn't leave much room for mistakes.

The program that the clients used was Winware which is able to send orders directly by mail as PDF.

First of all, a tailored document was created that should be easier to analyze for import into TRANSFLOW.
A program then read a mailbox at constant interval and decoded all attachments of the incoming mail
It then extracted all text of the PDF-files. Since the existing PDF decoders did not work, a new PDF decoder needed to be written first.
It analyzed all the text found in these PDF and formed import files out of them to a folder where they got read automatically by TRANSFLOW
The original mail together with status information then got reassembled and forwarded to another mailbox that was read by the staff.
A reply message was sent out to the customer to tell how many documents with how many positions were processed

The program was in use until Schoeni replaced TRANSFLOW by a new software. To my knowledge, they restarted this part of TRANSFLOW later because the new program is not able to handle mailed jobs from customers ...

APS system's TS200

Old top range annunciator system with major software flaws

Parts:

Firmware of the CPU
New programming software

1. The cleaning-up and the partial redesign of the firmware to support additional features for remote management and some bugfixes. The problem: almost no documentation and nobody to ask.

2. The complete remake of the programming software because the old version didn't work on Windows NT/2000/XP. The new software is based on a web server, enabling remote programming.

APS system's TS400

New top range annunciator system - from scratch

Parts:

Adapted operationg system based on Debian Linux
Selection of hardware
Design of a new robust and easy to use display
WEB interface and setup routines
core software and self-configuration functions
communication parts ('jobs')
adaption to connect the TS200 CPU
adaption to support the MODBUS protocol over serial lines for GSM connected remote devices
connection of intelligent nodes, currently based on WAGO products, tailored software and WEB interface
adaption to support ESPA 4.4.4 as server and client

It is not the nature of a full-blown OS like Linux to be easy to use in a company's existing network nor is it relly inteded to be used stand-alone at the same time. The setup work took a long time. Likewise, it is a challange to find the 'right' tools among the sheer uncountable amount of available software.

Besides this, the requirements and expectations that the whole as a system has to satisfy are countless and vary with each new installation. It was clear from the beginning that there would never be a 'standard' setup, but the system always has to behave as if. Open sourced, open featured, simple to setup and use.

One thing that shows a little of the philosophy behind the system is the firmware of the WAGO nodes. In general when the system is up and running, all alert messages could be handled by the central CPU. Since we may be working on a 'foreign' network of any extent, the communication may break at any moment. The software on the node has to behave cooperatively if the system is up and healthy and autonomically at the same moment if the connection to the rest of the system gets lost. All steering functions are handled by the node itself but all configuration and superordinated functions are handled by the central CPU. As consequence, an alert cannot be handled by a node alone, nor by the CPU alone. If one of them needs to act autonomically, they have to work out a common denominator as soon as the link is back, which may be after hours of separation.