PC/104 Boards from WDL Systems Power World’s Largest Format Printer

Single Board Solution Is Powerful and Rugged

Apex, NC – 30 July 2001 - Ever wonder what kind of machine cranks out larger-than-life billboard images? How about those eye-grabbing graphics rolling down the highway on the sides of big trucks?

Alabama–based Innovative Solutions Inc. is one of a handful of companies worldwide that designs and manufactures grand format printers capable of producing enormous outdoor signage – graphics from six feet to nearly ten feet wide and up to hundreds of feet long.

The company licenses its printers through California-based, and Swiss-owned, Raster Graphics, which in turn markets and services the printers all over the world under the name Arizona 1100.

Arizona 1100 printers are huge, each weighing 4000 pounds and measuring 17 feet long by 6 feet tall and 6 feet deep. While massive, the printers are handled by a single operator, activated through an industrial PC and four powerful small form factor PC/104 single board computers from Jumptec Adastra, each measuring but 96 x 90mm (3.25 x 3.775 inches).

This is possible because the printing process itself is fully automatic. The four PC/104 boards reside on Arizona 1100’s print carriage, which moves back and forth as the printer releases pigmented inks on vinyl, paper, mesh, and canvas.

James Gober, Vice-President of Research & Development, of Innovative Solutions, says, "There is quite a bit of data manipulation that goes into processing image files for printing, and we needed significant computing power to do it all in real time."

Gober says they chose a PC/104 format because the company needed small, high capacity CPUs to place on Arizona 1100’s print carriage as well as boards that use the standard ISA bus for interfacing with the company’s custom hardware. They also needed a rugged CPU capable of handling the vibrations created by large-scale printing.

"We needed a rugged solution that could support 100 megabit Ethernet, and we preferred to find a single board solution that would do this. After an extensive search, the Jumptec Adastra board was the only board that seemed to meet all our requirements."

Innovative Solutions chose the MOPSlcd6 designed and manufactured by Jumptec Adastra and purchased the boards through WDL Systems.

MOPSlcd6 and Large Format Printing
The MOPSlcd6 is a PC/104 single board computer that features a 166MHz (or 266MHz) MMX Pentium processor, onboard CRT/LCD support, 10/100Base T Ethernet, USB, serial, parallel, floppy, keyboard and mouse support. Its rugged, low-power design makes it ideal for industrial applications.

In this solution, the MOPSlcd6 boards apply Arizona 1100’s four ink colors: cyan, magenta, yellow and black, in combinations that simulate the spectrum of the rainbow.

Says Gober, "We separate the images to be printed into their primary colors. We then send pixel data for each color to a corresponding MOPSlcd6 board through an Ethernet interface."

Each MOPSlcd6 then synchronizes its pixel data with a linear encoder, resulting in firing the printheads at the proper position as the carriage is moving.

"In order to fire the print heads at the correct time," Gober says, "image data is transferred through the MOPSlcd6's ISA bus to custom hardware we developed. This in turn buffers the data to the printheads."

And how does the operator tell the MOPSlcd6 when to release their colors? The operator uses the industrial PC as the host computer, which then "talks" to the JUMPtec boards. Instructions on what to print are given via the Ethernet port.

During the printing process, the four boards do not communicate with one another; rather, they talk independently with the host computer, through QNX, the shared operating system.

QNX resides on each MOPSlcd6 on a 16MB chipDISK flash memory module. The chipDISK is an IDE flash device that plugs directly onto the MOPSlcd6 44-pin IDE connector. The host controller initially downloads the application code for the MOPSlcd6 via the Ethernet interface. During printing, the host controller passes image data to the MOPSlcd6 before each scan of the print carriage. This information is buffered in a 64MB SDRAM module on the MOPSlcd6. At the end of a scan, the next scan’s image data is transferred. This continues until the image is complete.

Gober says Innovative Solutions decided a single board design would prove to be more rugged for its Arizona 1100 printers rather than a multi-board solution. In fact, the company initially experimented with multi-board alternatives.

"I did the majority of my research on PC/104 on the Internet," he summarizes. "I found buyer's guides and manufacturer's web sites and searched through the information. I then contacted various manufacturers/distributors directly for pricing and answers to technical questions. Finally, I requested evaluation boards of the two or three that looked like they would be a good fit."

With PC/104, some difficulties arose with using QNX and also getting the ISA bus to run faster than the default speed. But the problems were overcome by updating some drivers and making a call to the BIOS to change the ISA bus speed.

Gober says, "We had some initial problems loading and running the QNX operating system on the board, but it was mainly related to BIOS settings and updated drivers the hardware needed. I really liked the Jumptec Adastra product. It was the only single board solution that met all of our needs."

And did he find WDL Systems helpful throughout this process? Gober states, "EMJ was very responsive. They have been very good at following up on our forecasts and providing current lead times. We will certainly look to EMJ first for support in future products."

ABOUT WDL Systems
WDL Systems, a division of EMJ America Inc., distributes a full line of single board computers, CompactPCI solutions, Flash solutions, PC Card disk drives, PC Card readers, PC/104 add-on cards, PC/104 peripherals, displays, software and enclosures. EMJ is a publicly traded company with revenues of $150 million and can be found on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the symbol EMJ.