Can a nekton drive?

Can you swim?
Are you insulted if I call you a "nekton"?
Well, I hope the answer is "yes" to the first question. And if you read on, then maybe the answer is "no" to the second.

Nekton refers to all the swimming organisms in a the ocean. These are able to move independently of currents of water, as opposed to plankton that just float along. So I hope that you and I both belong to that first category - I for sure can swim.

But what has this to do with driving? Well drive can be many things. In this context it refers to the apparatus that modulate electrical current to run ship propellers via electrical engines, so called variable frequency drives. A few years back I became aware that actually a large number of modern vessels use electricity to drive their propellers. This creates flexibility compared to running the propellers on the shafts of (e.g.) diesel engines, and more recently it interfaces nicely with rapidly developing energy storage technologies (like batteries).

Last week the company I work for launched a new low voltage variable speed drive for marine applications, like supply ships in the oil industry. And this new product is called "NektonDrive" (press release in Norwegian). This is a change from the typical names they operate with, like 800xA, ACS6000, PMS, and so on.

So why this sudden use of a name that can be pronounced? Well, as the product's project manager told me (my translation):

"It is a fantastic connection with what we are doing,

and many wonder how we found that name"

And what has this got to do with me, you may ask? Well, the name is the result of a naming competition. And who won? Well I did!

Parking @ OSL -- fraudulent practices?

So you want to travel via OSL, the Oslo airport called Gardermoen. Well beware! You may stumble into the fraudulent practices of the parking company there.

Last week I was traveling again, but I wanted to reach a meeting shortly after my return on Thursday. So I took my car and I planned to park within walking distance of the airport. But early in the morning of Monday 7, January the only parking lots that were open was one far away with a bus connection and the expensive parking house. When I checked the web during the weekend there was no mention of this. So what to do? The bus would jeopardise my chances of reaching the meeting. So I had to use the parking house, even though I could see that many of the other lots were almost empty.

If information about this had been available in advance I would have planned differently, but the willingness to help travelers this way is not a priority when you can rip them off instead. I ended up paying more than 150% more than the expected price.

In my mind this way of ensuring income is very bad. They could have made an effort to help customers avoid this with information on their web page.

So if you really want to ride a bus when you travel via OSL check out Parking @ Gardermoen. The one to suspect of bad information is Euro Park. On the other hand, there is an excellent train service as well as long distance buses.

I'm on sugru.com

I while back I made a cable to connect a JTAG test system to a proprietary DSP board. The cable has a Molex type connector in one end and a RJ45 in the other (not Ethernet), but the Molex side looked vulnerable with bare cables soldered to pins.

So I took some Sugru I had lying around and covered it up. I posted the result on their site, and today I discovered that my contribution is featured on the front page. If you look at the picture you can see my design in the lower left hand corner, see Make a 14-pin, 2 row connector.

Sugur is really a fantastic material, and I look forward to finding more uses for it.

Easy living

It has been a wonderful week. A week back a friend and I celebrated that we both had turned 50.

We had a big party in my garden with friends, live music, good weather, food and drink and everything else we could wish for. As you can see by the picture I was all smiles!

And it didn't stop there.

On Thursday I had my last day at my job in TraceTracker. I handed in my resignation some time back since I got an offer for a new challenge in a major engineering company. But first I cashed in a gift certificate for spa treatment on Friday to "wash off" my old job. And yesterday, out of the blue, I learnt that a musical wizard from earlier times, Ken Hensley, was performing at Eidsvoll Rock & Blues Klubb not far away. So I got to get my head cleaned out with old Uriah Heep music as well. Big success!

I start in my new job tomorrow, and I look forward to coming back to low level programming in the hardware/software interface.

Applications of EPICS in food supply chain management

I'm presenting at the workshop Applications of EPICS in food supply chain management in Oslo 16. November. This workshop is based around the work done by SINTEF Fisheries and Aquaculture, Matis and TraceTracker (where I work) in the eTrace project. I hope to see you there if you are interested in the use of EPCIS for applications like traceability, sustainability, logistics optimization and supply chain management!

TraceTracker Data Uploader and the 5 step model

Earlier this week I had a customer in central Europe wanting a canned version of a product demonstration I just gave them. Well, the raw material proved too large to be distributed in email, so I ran it through Windows Movie Maker before uploading it to my YouTube account. I guess I should have used the TraceTracker account, but I forgot. Anyway, according to rumors it was a great success.

If you need a manual way to upload traceability information to the Global Traceability Network you can take a look yourself here.

My favorite meeting facilities

Occasionally I experience things that I really like. This time I have discovered my favorite facility for meetings. A bit impractical as it lies in Germany while my work is based out of Norway. However, I am willing to travel when invited!

The building pictured on the right lies in Ludwigshafen in Germany. It is referred to as Gesellschaftshaus, which means something like "party house", but these days it is also used to house business meetings. Not only are the meeting rooms agreeable and well furnished. There is also a restaurant there where one can have both lunch and dinner served. And the food is very good.

Last week I enjoyed a meeting there for the second time. Travelling down on the 24. August was a bit difficult, as a storm closed down Frankfurt airport before I was scheduled to land and my train to Mannheim was delayed.
But the meeting, lunch and dinner the next day at the Gesellschaftshaus was a pleasure!

Earlier visits to Ludwigshafen have been alluded to here and here. At least!

Agro based clusters and traceability

With the recent ecoli incidents in Europe I suspect it may get even worse for farmers in developing countries to sell their products. German authorities are now certain that it was locally grown products that were to blame, but the average consumer may have become more conscious that it matters where foodstuff comes from.

So what should growers of fruit and vegetables in developing countries do to secure market access?

Last weekend I read a FAO report on Agro based clusters in developing countries. I have become involved in the design of such a cluster, with focus on using electronic traceability for creating product documentation. This solution is intended to support the cluster in creating market advantages through the use of modern export and sales support technologies. But can this also be used to make the end consumer trust the products?

A pilot in the eTrace project had success with using traceability information in the dialog with consumers at the point of sale. According to the fish monger “Instead of selling just a few kilos a day, I sold more than 150 kilos over 4 days. This is a very significant increase for us.”

Can similar effects be expected if flowers, fruit and vegetables from developing countries are equipped with traceability information? And how should it be done, by printing the information on the packaging or by providing links to online solutions like this (in Norwegian)?

Firewood secured!

Last winter was cold, and our consumption of firewood was greater than usual. So we made repeated trips to our forest to get more firewood. Collecting firewood is a kind of slave work for a office worker like myself. It is nice for a change, but I am happy I don't have to do it all year round. On the other hand, if I did it on a more reguar basis I probably wouldn't be so totally exhausted afterwards.


Anyway, last Saturday I was off again to convert logs to suitable sized firewood. To contain the firewood while it dries I made a cylinder from a mesh for concrete reinforcement - "armeringsnett" as it is called in Norwegian. I fear that this is not enough to keep us through the next winter. Luckily, we haven't exhausted our older supplies yet, and we have large resources of live trees.

To split the wood I wanted to get me a new block ("huggestabbe" as it is called in Norwegian), and a big pine that was felled just before Christmas had already been split into suitable pieces.

So when I went down to get it I found this timberman. The antennas were at least 7cm long! Being where a pine was lying on the ground it probably was busy seeking out the females!

To add to my hard labour I had to move the hoggestabbe back to our cabin. The wheelbarrow proved to be too unstable with me at the handles. So I had to roll the thing around 100 meters uphill. For the first time I have a hoggestabbe that matches my height - lucky me!

Tagging in Iceland

A couple of weeks ago I was in Iceland to run another RFID project. The contect was the same as this project. This time we had more tools available, like handheld RFID scanners with embedded software to compose XML for upload to the project EPCIS.


In the previous project we attached the RFID tags directly to the fish boxes, but this time we tried a different approach. The fish was stored on ice in big tubs. These were stored in a cold store, and they were wet. So instead of trying to get a piece of surface that we could fasten the tag, we attached them to handles in the corners of the tubs with the help of some extra paper tags. So here you see me, dressed up according to the rules of the processing company, giving a tub of Sebastes marinus identity.


These paper tags proved to be very convenient. As the project progressed we could take them off, make notes and so on. Of course, had the use of RFID been integrated into the production, then everything would be automatic. But this was a pilot in a type of chain that is not among the first movers. So we had to do a lot of manual operations, and then we could make notes on the tags that helped us fill in the holes in the traceability model later on.

To cover the different roles of traced items we employed both SGTIN and GRAI type RFID tags. The finished products, that were airlifted to markets in mainland Europe, were equipped with SGTINs, while the tubs with fish and similar vessels that were being used in the productions, were equipped with GRAIs. This way the proper XML can decommission the tags, so that they can be reused later without being related traceability-wise to earlier uses.

Dual RFID tags in Pack & Sea's fish crates

Recently I participated on a project that sought to create traceability on fish caught in Swedish waters. While we affixed GRAI RFID tags to fish crates on the go (this was a pilot), we also observed some of the characteristic green fish crates from Pack & Sea. So we decided to try if our standard RFID readers could read these as well.

Reading those fish crates turned out to be no problem. But to our surprise each of the crates from Pack & Sea contained two RFID tags, with different identities. So if we had a stack of, say, 10 crates and one was from Pack & Sea, then we would read 11 identifiers.

This seemed very impractical in harbors where fish crates from a number of sources may be used on the same vessel. So to avoid having different routines for the presence of such crates, we decided to avoid them.

Actually, I do not think it is according to EPCglobal's guidelines to have use two identities in this way.