MineWorX installed its SMS Critical Alert and Remote Access solution for Electro Mac on Friday, 10 January. MineWorX developed the solution for Electro Mac after Electro Mac MD, Paul de Villiers met MineWorX at the Electra Mining Exhibition in October last year.
"I was impressed by their business understanding and level of technical expertise," said De Villiers. "They were professional in their approach to our problems and the solution they proposed fitted us both technically and financially."
Electro Mac installs plant control systems that communicate with a base station via Radio Frequency. The control system has been developed by IRC and has an operating range of 30km. The radio base station is connected via RS232 to a PC. When an abnormal condition occurs, an alarm is raised on the PC console. The condition can then be checked and corrected via the PC console.
"The problem we had was that you cannot sit in front of the console the entire day and what do you do when you need to travel? The SMS Critical Alert and Remote Access solution from MineWorx was the answer," De Villiers said.
According to Daneel van Eck, Technical Director of MineWorx, one of the prerequisites for a solution was that no changes were to be made to the IRC console software in any way. The SMS Critical Alert system had to be designed to monitor the IRC console database and send an SMS when an abnormal condition is flagged. "The advantage of having an SMS alert is that the user does not have to monitor the console the entire time, they can now be anywhere in the world - as long as they have GSM connectivity," Van Eck says.
"When I get the SMS I know that there is a problem in the plant, but my being in Cape Town while the PC console is on a farm in Polokwane (Pietersburg) created the next problem," De Villiers said. "You cannot move the PC Console around like a laptop due to the radio base stations limited range, otherwise the problem would have been solved." The Remote Access solution was installed to address this problem.
The Remote Access solution is run on a PDA that has GSM connectivity. The user dials up the PC Console and can access the Console via the PDA.
"Electro Mac opted for the @migo PD-600 SE running Pocket PC with a PCMCIA Nokia phone card as the mobile front-end. The SMS server developed by MineWorx uses a Siemens TC35 terminal. The solution can run on any Pocket PC device connecting via infrared or other means to the GSM network. The data call option was selected rather than GPRS due to the high volume of data that needed to be transferred over a short period of time," Van Eck said.
Electro Mac has installed the solution at a pilot site in Polokwane and will be on-selling the MineWorX solution together with the IRC control system as a turnkey solution. Paul de Villiers / Electro Mac can be contacted at (015) 293 1251 or 083 276 5136 or paul_dev@lantic.net for further information.
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