Case Studies
Over the past years Zitera have been involved in a number of exciting projects ranging from the commercial industry, raw materials manufacturing, mining and defense industry. From our vast collection of projects we showcase some of our most exciting work below.
Case 1: Route Gaming Solutions
The Low Payout Machine (LPM) gambling industry, unlike a conventional casino, is a network of slot machines that are distributed across select sites in South Africa, where each site can have any number of slot machines up to a maximum of 40. South African gambling law, however, dictates that the revenue of these machines at each site must be monitored to ensure fairness to the gambler and for tax purposes. This sort of monitoring is fairly simple in a casino where all the machines are together at a single location, however, the nature of this distributed network of machines and the fact that some of the sites are located in remote places poses a major technical challenge to ensure data integrity. These specialised monitoring services are provided by Zonke Monitoring Systems South Africa.
Route Gaming Solutions, which is a strategic partner to Zonke Monitoring Systems, is responsible for the software planning, deployment and maintenance of the Central Electronic Monitoring System (CEMS) as well as the software/hardware support of the Site Data Loggers (SDLs) that drive the Zonke monitoring system for the LPM market.
Zitera provides Route Gaming Solutions with the following services:
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All embedded software development for the SDLs and custom hardware running on ARM processors and FPGAs, and
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all the electronic hardware design for the SDLs and related hardware to ensure effective and secure logging of LPM revenue data.
Case 2: Anglo Coal HUMS
Proper Health and Usage Monitoring (HUM) of equipment can be directly linked to an organization's Operating Effective Efficiency (OEE) which directly affects the organization's bottom line. In this case Zitera developed a complete Health and Usage Monitoring System (HUMS) for ore trucks that carry ore from an open-cast mine's digging site to the mine's ore processing site.
Our client, Anglo American, operates a number of large mines in South Africa and are heavily reliant on these large ore trucks, the health of these ore trucks are paramount to the OEE of the mining operations and the HUMS system provide managers with real-time data of how their fleet is performing and based on the HUM data, can make optimisations in the day to day operation of the mine and ore trucks. The long-term impact of the HUMS system is that operational costs are reduced which directly increases the company's profit margin.
Zitera was responsible for the end-to-end development and deployment of the HUMS system (which is by and large a customisation of our leading TrackTec tracking system) for the Anglo American ore trucks. The project contains:
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Harsh environment Vehicle Data Logger (VDL) that logs general HUM data from the vehicle engines, generators etc. and strain gauges that measure the loading on the vehicle; and
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a wireless data communication network in the mine; and
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central TrackTec server that provides real-time reports of the current HUM data.
Case 3: UPsolute Diesel Engine Management System
UPsolute is an Austrian based company that specialises in the performance tuning of vehicle engines, also known as chiptuning. The project included the following:
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Engine electronic fuel injection,
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engine condition monitoring,
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in vehicle data networking and self diagnostics.
Zitera was responsible for:
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Full system level engineering,
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full on-board hardware and software development and support,
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full off-board hardware and software development and support.
MONITORING & DATA ACQUISITION
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Zitera has developed advanced offsite monitoring systems that boast the following features & technologies:
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HARSH ENVIRONMENT
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Zitera has developed a host of harsh environment solutions for clients which included some of the following aspects: Harsh Environment ComputingZitera is a distributor of a number of Harsh Environment computing hardware but has also developed turn-key computing solutions for clients that include harsh environment hardware and software. Zitera has also developed a number of safety critical solutions.
Custom Hardware DesignZitera has developed custom hardware solutions that are geared and certified for harsh environment usage. Each hardware application served specific requirements but implemeneted some of the following technologies:
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DATA MANAGEMENT
Modern day systems have, over recent years, become more complex in nature and many systems as a result have developed their own custom data protocols. When an application thus arises that two such systems need to be integrated and share data, protocol conversion needs to take place. Depending on the nature of the protocol and environment of the system this can be a major challenge.
Zitera has recently developed a custom hardware and software solution that does protocol conversion from a serial communication medium to a TCP/IP communication medium.
