Electricity + Control January 2018

round up

DRIVES, MOTORS + SWITCHGEAR

Functional, affordable, reliable comms for underground

To meet mines’ WiFi requirements, the company uses the MCO- TECH range of products underground and on surface, including wireless access point networks, intrinsically safe Android tablets for use in fiery mines and VoIP wireless handsets. It also offers various fit-for-purpose fire suppression products to address fire hazards that could jeopardise the functionality of the communica- tion system. Enquiries: Anton Lourens. Email anton@booyco-electronics.co.za

Experts in communication systems for underground coal and hard rock mines, Ya Batho ’s locally developed and manufactured com- munication products offer both a high level of functionality and an affordable cost of ownership. Active in the market since 2010, Ya Batho grew quickly from its focus on fibre optics installation and has become a provider of di- rect contracting services to major players in the mining industry. Through its commitment to reliable and quality workmanship, it has grown its business to encompass turnkey solutions in the lay- out and design of communication systems. Ya Batho also supplies fibre optic infrastructure, leaky feeder communication systems, medium frequency radios andWi-Fi infrastructure and accessories. It also maintains and services the equipment it supplies. The operation specialises in installing and splicing new fibre op- tic cables and repairing existing cables, testing their splicing integ- rity and issuing certificates verifying this splicing integrity, whether on surface or underground. It offers the Trinity range of leaky feeder products, designed to improve the quality and functionality of underground communica- tions. For all medium frequency communication requirements, Ya Batho has the Kutta range of products. These medium frequency radios work with existing mine infrastructure (such as power ca- bles, wire core lifelines, phone lines and conveyor structures) to transmit voice and tracking data to surface.

Planetary Mission Images digitised Planetary Mission Images being digitisedIn 2015, NASA part- nered with the University of Arizona, providing funding to dig- itise the film images and data from the Surveyor moon landers that have been in storage since the 1960s. The goal is to cre- ate an archive for inclusion in the NASA Planetary Data System (PDS), a collection of data products from NASA planetary mis- sions. Between 1966 and 1968, the five successful Surveyor missions returned over 92 000 individual images of the moon’s surface. Film images were created by focusing a 70 mm film- camera at a precision CRT display monitor and photographed onto special recording film. In the 50 years since, the computer files and video tape records have long disappeared or become obsolete—the only existing copies of the images are the film rolls. Many frames from the Surveyor missions had seemingly legible text, which the operators initially thought could easily be read by conventional optical character recognition (OCR) soft- ware. They soon discovered that the characters in the text were a dot matrix similar to old printers using a 7x9 teletype-style character, making it a challenge to find an OCR software capable of accurately reading the text fields. “Lorne Trottier, co-owner of Matrox, reached out to the university offering assistance us- ing Matrox’s OCR software to read LPL’s text information. [LPL] selected some cropped images to upload for a test and the re- sults were amazing. It was very encouraging, especially with thefailure of other OCR products to read the human readable text (HRT).” Enquiries: Email pr@matrox.com

22 Electricity + Control

JANUARY 2018