In the early 90's a new tourist development was approved at the Seal Rocks site on Phillip Island, Victoria. The site was to include cafes, a restaurant, extensive viewing platforms to enable visitors to view the seals frollicking off the coast of the island on the nearby rocks, a theater for multimedia presentations of the history of the region which could also show a live panoramic video feed from the rocks and, best of all, an educational theme park style boat ride in a massive canal in the basement.

I was hired to assist with the implementation and installation of the computer control system for the ride. The ride ran through several hundred metres of twisting, turning canal. Visitors rode in groups of four in floating dingies which followed the slowly moving, pump driven current in the water. The twists in the canal intentionally limited the view ahead to only a couple of metres.

The boats stopped at regular intervals, restrained by hooks under the water which could be activated and released by the computer control system. At each stop a display beside the canal was illuminated and sound, video projection and a light show were triggered. Each show ran for a minute or two and explained something of the history of the discovery and exploration of the area.

The control system we installed used fourteen custom made computers, each with a 68hc11 processor. The computers were linked on a multi-drop RS485 serial network and connected to a collection of sensors and relays.

The sensors were infra red beams which were used to detect the position of boats in the canal. The relays were used to activate the boat hooks which retained and released the boats to avoid collisions and keep the boats in sync with the sound and light show around them and to trigger the audio/video devices and the light show.

We hand wired a control booth at the entrance to the ride with controls hooked to the master control computer. Its job was to track the state of all the computers on the network, tell them when to start/stop shows, release/retain boats and what language to play for the soundtrack for each boat. The system supported a number of European and Asian languages.

The operator was notified of the state of each of the boats in the ride using a sequence of steady or flashing lights. As a rule, if every was flashing then all hands had been lost, turn out the lights, go home, lock the door on the way out and never come back.

Very few boats sank. It could have been really good.

Task: Programmer

Skills:6811 assembly code

1993 - 1994 Amitron

Amitron designed and built embedded hardware for ???. The boards used Z80 with code written in a combination of assembly code and C using the Hi-tech C compiler/assembler.

We had a small assembly line and wave soldering machine suitable for prototype runs of hardware. I spent a lot of time building and testing boards including manual assembly of small prototype runs of new hardware designs. I wrote some C and Z80 assembly code programs to test the hardware and wrote the program we used to write binaries to the on board flash ROM on the Z80 boards.

I first came across Visual Basic here when we developed a Windows application for keeping track of production using VB and and an Access database.

Task:

Skills:Z80 assembly code, Visual Basic, Access

1991 - 1992 TCI

TCI was a printed circuit board manufactrer based in Braeside specialising in small volume rapid turn-around production of circuit boards. Initially single sided and double sided boards though later they expanded to handle more complex multi-layer designs.

I programmed and operated the NC drilling and routing machines which are used to drill the through holes in circuit boards and to route the finished boards from the larger panels in which they are manafactured.

The NC drill programs were long lists of x,y coordinates interspersed with tool selection commands and special commands to perform tasks like repeating a block with an offset, useful when drilling multiple copies of a small board on a large panel.

I wrote several utility programs in Microsoft QuickBasic to allow us to graphically view, examine and edit the drill files before sending them to the drills. We saved a lot of material that way.

I also ran the photo plotting equipment. The circuit layout is printed directly to a photo sensitive film using a vector plotting machine which uses a narrow beam of light rather than the pen of a conventional plotter. The developed film creates a positive image of the circuit layout which is then used to prepare screen printing screens which print the layout to the board in preparation for subsequent plating and etching processes.

1989 - 1991 Eagle Technologies

Eagle designed and manufactured PC peripherals, initially video adapters (CGA, EGA, VGA and even monochrome Hercules compatible adapters which were popular for desktop publishing at the time).

The product range grew to include drive controllers, serial and parallel cards, ethernet cards and even motherboards.

Competition from cheap Asian imports was fierce but for awhile local manufactures of IT hardware enjoyed a modicum of protection with public sector and corporate customers being offered incentives to buy local products.

I worked on the assembly line, manually populating printed circuit boards with components, overseeing their passage through the wave soldering machine, trimming, cleaning and inspecting and testing the finished boards.

Testing involved connecting the finished boards to a test rig (often the guts of a PC, with no case and the motherboard nailed to a piece of wood!) and firing it up to see what happened.

The test machines booted MS/DOS from harddisk or floppy. I had the chance to write some of the test software. This was my first exposure to C. I wrote some very simple C programs to perform memory tests of the onboard RAM on video cards, read and write ports and registers to check for correct response, cycle the video cards through various modes and test patterns, prompting the user to verify that image on the screen display matched the expected output.

I also wrote some graphics demos for the first VGA cards as there was very little software available at the time to demostrate what a VGA card could do. The programs drew moving patterns on screen while cycling the VGA pallette. A rather hypnotic effect which drew crowds at several trade shows.