BMH Chronos Richardson Case Study

Real-Time Data Server

Company Profile

BMH Chronos Richardson is market leader in bagging, weighing, dosing and batching technologies including plant control systems. Businesses served include the chemical, plastics, rubber, food and feed industries. Chronos Richardson operates from the UK, Germany, France, Italy and the USA, and also has a joint venture in India.

The UK division of BMH Chronos Richardson, the Batching Systems Group, specialises in weighing, solids handling, pneumatic conveying and plant process control. The Group's main area of expertise lies in the rubber and plastics industries, where the company is a leading supplier of intake systems and mixer feed systems for compounding applications. System solutions are also provided for building material and plaster blending plants, refractory manufacture and control systems for animal feed mills.

Beacon has worked with the UK division of BMH Chronos Richardson for many years. This case study describes one of a number of projects we have completed for them.

Business Requirements

The majority of Chronos Richardson’s computers are based on PC hardware running the QNX  real-time operating system. The data held on these computers is similar to a database with a tree structure where the leaves of the tree are known as Tags. This name/value depiction of data is very common in process control environments. Each tag represents a physical value of a process variable, for example the weight of an item. These industrial computers often have to interface to standard PCs running Microsoft Windows, with lower cost PCs used as Annunciators or for Material Tracking systems. The communication from the QNX computers to the PC is via the LAN using TCP.

Beacon was asked to design and implement a component to run on the Windows PCs. The main function of this component was to read and write the Tags on the QNX computer using a TCP connection.

Our Solution

Beacon developed a Data Server to run on the Windows PC using Microsoft Visual Basic. The Server appeared as an icon in the task bar and ran in background serving tags to other applications on the same computer. When the Server was activated, a window displayed the current tag values and communication activity using tree and list view panes in a splitter window.

Our activities covered the full project cycle including requirements capture, development of a functional specification, design and analysis, development, implementation, testing, implementation and support.