• Managed 6 software developers and one hardware engineer, and one contract developer.
• Designed and developed an entire machine control system, (written in C++), using the QNX4 RTOS x86 platform.
• Developed several interfaces utilizing serial, (RS422), and tcp control paths (including an RPC based protocol).
• Maintained the code base using the Perforce source code control system.
• Assisted in the design and implementation of test procedures and worked very closely with test engineering.
• Designed CD/DVD manufacturing into the build system.

Through the years the automation company was bought and sold several times. Consequently, it is known as “Alamar Automation”, “Philips Automation” and “Thomson Automation”.I was hired by Alamar for the purpose of developing a “next generation” machine control server to be integrated into their world class broadcast automation system. The purpose of an automation system is to automate the work flow of an entire broadcast facility, including 24/7 scheduling of “on air” content (across multiple channels), media management, and reconciliation reporting. The automation system architecture consisted of two basic subsystems: The scheduler and the machine control system.
The scheduler describes on air events, and the machine control system orchestrates the machines to produce those events in real time. As revenue for the broadcaster depends on accurate “on air” scheduling, the automation is a “mission critical” application.

 I was given two main objectives: To manage a group of software developers who were developing device interfaces (in Z80 assembly) for use with the current  system, and to develop a new LAN based machine control system that would offer a C++ development environment for “embedded device interfaces”, and to provide backward compatibility for the existing (Z80)device interfaces.

I designed, developed and supported (to “end of life”) what came to be called the “MSL” (Machine Server LAN). The MSL was a “many-to-many” server that operated independently, (or in parallel with other MSL’s), to provide multiple automation clients with the services of multiple broadcast devices (physical machines). The client/server interface consisted of a LAN based protocol that facilitated the abstraction of physical to virtual devices. That is, the MSL presented the automation with virtual devices that “hid” the device specific characteristics of the actual devices. While the MSL operated as a subsystem within the automation application, it was designed to operate as an independent server system.

The MSL software was released on CD and installation was completely automated. With device assignment configured via an XML interface. It included system wide logging and a complete remote debugging environment.

Many facilities around the world used (and continue to use) the automation  system including:
DirectTV, USA
Digiturk, Istanbul, Turkey
ITV,  Yorkshire, England
Granada, London, England
NET7, Melbourne, Australia