Client Examples

Here are some high-level examples of some of the type of work that we have done.

It is not an exhaustive list, but rather is representative of the technology that we bring to the industry.

High Speed Manufacturing

By high speed, we mean working with machines that churn out up to 200 units per second. At project completion, this client will have over 150 NT machines, running as both client and servers, with almost one half of them running about 15 of our own DDE drivers. To communicate with a high speed vision inspection system, we even wrote our own NT Kernel Mode Device Driver. This job has everything: HMI software, complex network solutions, specialized communications drivers, parts ordering, training, simulators, databases and expert system operator help screens.

Food Processing Applications

Regulations on the food processing industry are very tight, and with good reason. We have done several jobs working in plants where various candy and snacks are made, and are able to meet their very rigorous requirements.

Filament and Fiber

For a fiber plant making yarn for carpets, quality and extremely tight control are essential. These systems require very close monitoring, as even the slightest recipe variations can result in manufacture of unusable product. Many times these variations can't be discovered until the yarn is actually woven into carpet, costing the manufacturer a great deal of money.

Injection Molding Systems

A customer has a plant in Mexico, and an office in the United States. How can he find out how the machines in Mexico are operating? ASI created displays on a PC that matched the extruder's local control screens, and also allowed for a remote PC to dial in and duplicate those screens anywhere in the world, while still maintaining a secure system.

Embedded Systems

This is one place where we got the chance to turn out some very complex embedded systems software, burned on EPROM and running on dedicated Motorola based processor boards. Our people worked to port the operating system (OS-9) to the system board, writing code for the Ethernet system drivers. We also worked with the manufacturer to develop and implement a remote communication protocol, process control algorithms and PID control software, working with motor controllers and measuring real time weight loss.

Glass Coating Applications

This job relied very heavily on Wonderware, communicating to PLCs. Central computers control the entire process, regulating and displaying temperatures, vacuums, power supplies and overall status all along the coating line. We picked up the glass just after it was cut, and took it all the way to the final inspection.

Wastewater Treatment

Whereas the glass coating applications have extremely dense HMI screens (lots of points displayed per square inch), wastewater treatment facilities lend themselves to very clean, elegant control and monitoring screens. These HMI systems are vital to gather information and produce reports required by government regulations.

Motor Controllers

When a major motor controller manufacturer wanted DDE drivers written for his equipment, he turned to ASI. We gave him four DDE servers, including all source code, in record time. The client then had a DDE driver available to sell to customers who purchased a controller.

Robotic Assembly

ASI jumped into a highly automated assembly plant, which uses assembly robots throughout its manufacture of car parts. This job involved adding new manufacturing steps to currently running lines, including work required to add a vision based quality inspection system.

Overtime and Scheduling

This was, honestly, a job that we got into because the manufacturer was in a bind, and we had done some very good work for him previously. This application runs under Microsoft Access, and allows employees all over the plant to request overtime work. The requests then end up with a supervisor, who accepts/rejects each request. Operators can then check back at any time before the start of their overtime to find out if they got the times that they wanted.