ITE College Central 1 (5)

(MacPherson Campus)
Prepared (also subject responsible if other) Title
Lim Seow Chiong Industrial Attachment Report
Approved Checked Date Rev File

6-Feb-06 1.0 IndustrialAttachmentReport2006

Industrial Attachment Report

1. BACKGROUND .............................................................................................................................. 1
1.1 ABOUT THE COMPANY .................................................................................................................................. 1
1.2 NATURE OF INDUSTRIAL ATTACHMENT ........................................................................................................... 1
2. CHALLENGES ................................................................................................................................ 2
3. PHOTOS ......................................................................................................................................... 2
4. SUPPORTING DOCUMENTS ......................................................................................................... 5

1. Background
This is a brief report to share what was done during my industrial attachment at Expedient Tech Pte Ltd.

Company Name: Expedient Tech Pte Ltd

Address: Nanyang Polytechnic,
Ang Mo Kio Ave 8,
Blk N Unit 717,
Singapore 569830
Duration: 12 December 2005 – 13 January 2006 (4 weeks)

1.1 About the Company

Expedient Tech Pte Ltd is a company which provides electronic design services for clients. The founders
of the firm are a group of engineers with more than 40 years of combined experience in embedded
software, wireless system design, regulatory qualifications and production.

1.2 Nature of Industrial Attachment

The assignment was to develop the firmware for an industrial controller for lubricant application. The
lubricant controller is a micro controller based design for centralized lubrication systems to feed lubricant
from a central source to places on machines or systems where friction is a problem. Upon powering up,
the controller reads in a set settings related to the operation of lubrication control. These parameters
include pause interval, modes of operation and wiring check settings etc. Base on the settings and other
sensors inputs such as air pressure, oil levels sensors etc, the controller controls the operations of motor,
oil pump and safety interlocks etc.

The lubricant controller was being developed for Vogel Japan Ltd. Additional details on the operation of
the controller is available at http://www.vogelag.com.

The lubricant controller is already in use by Vogel Japan Ltd. However they do not have access to the
code and the design of the controller which is developed by another company. Vogel Japan would like to
be able to save cost by having access to the code and design so that they can produce the controllers on
their own. That is why Expedient Tech Pte Ltd was engaged to reverse engineer the lubricant controller.
This involves capturing the design of the hardware from an existing lubricant controller, as well as to write
the firmware code to replicate the behaviour of the controller.

The hardware engineer at Expedient Tech Pte Ltd was responsible for the hardware design while I was
responsible for the firmware design. The microcontroller used was PIC16F628A. “C’ language was used to
code the firmware, using the C compiler Microchip PICMicro MCUs from CCS (Custom Computer Services
Inc.).
 ITE College Central 2 (5)
(MacPherson Campus)
Prepared (also subject responsible if other) Title
Lim Seow Chiong Industrial Attachment Report
Approved Checked Date Rev File

6-Feb-06 1.0 IndustrialAttachmentReport2006

2. Challenges
This section documents the challenges faced throughout the project

As this was a commercial project for a foreign client, it was important to be ensure that the design will be
reliable and on time. There were challenges in picking up new skills quickly as it was my first time dealing
with PIC microcontroller firmware development.

Moreover with the lack of debugging facilities, crude method of debugging like toggling LEDs to help trace
the code had to be used.

It was also a challenge to design and develop the firmware at the same time as the hardware, since no
hardware would then be ready to test if the firmware was working.

The other problem faced was that the specifications for the lubricant controller are not entirely documented
by Vogel Japan. Even those there are documented it is sometimes difficult to understand the specifications
as when the specifications were written in English by Japanese, there were mistakes in the translation that
resulted in misunderstanding of the specifications. Some of the specifications are also not documented. So
a lot of time I had to rely on a working sample of the lubricant controller provided by Vogel Japan to
understand what is the actual behaviour expected of the controller under different situations, and then try
to replicate the behaviour in the firmware I write.

As firmware bugs are difficult to eradicate, a lot of time is also spent on fixing the firmware. But fixing a
part of the code might result in causing a wrong behaviour under a different controller setting. So a
number of test cases were drawn up and tested and retested when code changes was done. This was
time consuming and tedious. Moreover bug fixing is an ongoing process until the team at Vogel Japan has
tested the firmware fully and conclude that the behaviour of the controller is acceptable. So ongoing effort
has to be put in to support the company as and when bugs are reported.

3. Photos
This section shows how the completed lubricant controller looks like, as well as the development
environment.
 ITE College Central 3 (5)
(MacPherson Campus)
Prepared (also subject responsible if other) Title
Lim Seow Chiong Industrial Attachment Report
Approved Checked Date Rev File

6-Feb-06 1.0 IndustrialAttachmentReport2006

Figure 1 Sample Lubricant Controller from Vogel Japan

 ITE College Central 4 (5)
(MacPherson Campus)
Prepared (also subject responsible if other) Title
Lim Seow Chiong Industrial Attachment Report
Approved Checked Date Rev File

6-Feb-06 1.0 IndustrialAttachmentReport2006

Figure 2 Lubricant Controller Developed (Showing LEDs and Rotary Switch Mapping)
 ITE College Central 5 (5)
(MacPherson Campus)
Prepared (also subject responsible if other) Title
Lim Seow Chiong Industrial Attachment Report
Approved Checked Date Rev File

6-Feb-06 1.0 IndustrialAttachmentReport2006

Figure 3 Development Environment

4. Supporting Documents
More information about the industrial attachment assignment can be found by looking through the software
specifications and the test specifications. The first two documents listed are the specifications for the
lubrication controller from Vogel Japan (not attached).

[1] Lubrication Controller Operating Instruction, Vogel Japan Ltd, 16 February 2004.
[2] Lubrication Controller IGZ38F for Vogel Japan Ltd Specification, Kinkei Systems Document No.
FF03792-00.
[3] Lubrication Controller IGZ38F Software Test Specifications, Lim Seow Chiong, 16 December 2005.
[2] Lubrication Controller IGZ38F Software Requirements Specifications, Lim Seow Chiong, 16
December 2005.