Niche on factory floor

Press, 6 October 1987, Page 50

Niche on factory floor

By

NEILL BIRSS

Water sloshes on the floor in the musselprocesslng rooms of the Sanford fish factory at Bromley. Hygiene control for this export product means at times there seems as much water as in the mussel farms- of Marlborough. Definitely not the environment for an off-the-shelf personal computer. But Christchurch-made microcomputers are collecting information in the mussel shed, and in the Phoenix meat works at Koklri, on the West Cofl-St-The marketer is Toltec Scales, Ltd, a Christ-church-owned firm with a background in the weighing industry. Since a management buy-out brought control of Toltec back to Christchurch, the firm has been looking for ways of enhancing its products. Mr Tony Olissoff, the Toltec Scale’s sales and marketing manager, says the need for computer collecting of weight and other information from the factory floor was quickly apparent. Nothing suitable for the meat or fish environment could be found, and Toltec Scale forged a link with a tiny Christchurch firm, Triton Microcontrol. This has built two microcomputers to power data-collection systems being marketed by Toltec Scale. At the Sanfords factory, a Triton Benjy unit is used to track production of mussels. Each shucker puts a name token on baskets as these are filled with opened mussels. These are taken to a scale. The operator keys in the code from the name token. The weight is fed in directly from the electronic scale. The Benjy keeps a running total with time and periodically prints these out at a remote location. For Sanfords, the Benjy provides a more efficient alternative to a tally clerk. The question and answer format means the system can be learned quickly by many workers. It allows quick collation of wages and payment for each mussel farm. It helps Sanford keep records to a level that if an overseas restaurant should complain about a batch of mussels, the farm and processor can be traced. The Benjy, encased in stainless steel, has a threeline LCD screen and an 80-key touchpad. Including log on, there are three levels of password. Triton Microcontrol comprises Mr lan Jackson, a former Cashmere High School computing teacher, and

Mr Brian Chatterton. This the company’s third year and the first in which both men have worked in it full time.

The first of Triton’s other machines, the Zaphod, has a ZBOB microprocessor and a 128 K RAM. The second Zaphod, now bn the drawing boards, will be a 512 K RAM machine and will use the Hitachi HD64180 microprocessor. Both Benjy and the Zaphod are eight-bit machines." Mr Jackson says data capture in the industrial world is nearly always eight-bit, and this is why Triton Microcontrol chose the eight-bit Hitachi HD64180 as its microprocessor for the Benjy. “This is a very, very smart processor. It has all the things microcomputers have got plus features such as three serial channels on the chip.” It is difficult to compare the performances of such different machines, but Mr Jackson feels the machine will “beat the pants off’ an IBM PC XT. Making the waterproof boxes for the computers is “horrendously expensive.” Mr Jackson designs them, and has them laser cut

' The Zaphod can be linked to 16 remote units by half- duplex serial ports and two parallel ports. It can run up to four floppy-disk drives. The CMOS RAM memory is backed up by a power supply so that data is not lost in the event of a power

failure. This is critical in a factory, where spikes and dips occur in power, and where power phases can cause problems. The Benjy at Sanford runs at slightly over 6MHz. It has 96K of RAM memory as standard, but is expandable to 196 K. It can be linked to 10 data logging units. ■ The Triton systems have been installed at the Blenheim plant of Sanfords as well as in Christchurch and at Kokiri. How does such a Christchurch-built system find a toehold in a world market? When it comes to meat and fish processing, the South Island is no tiny outpost Toltec has provided a strong market-led orientation for the product. Probably most important is the cost Tony Olissoff says a Benjy system for a factory begins about $25,000. To his firm’s knowledge, and it looked overseas before working with Triton, a comparable imported system would cost from about $lOO,OOO. .