July 2007 to December 2007,
January 2008 to Feburary 2008
Summary: Consultant Software Developer assisting Ultra-SML with the development of a security surveillance and warning system for a major port.

Specifically responsible for the development of plug-in projects interfacing an IP controlled third party camera control server and a remote chemical detection system to SMLs C2DB monitoring application.

Both plug-ins are written in native C++, with parts of the user interface and unit tests implemented in managed C++, C++/CLI and Winforms where appropriate.

Summary: Currently engaged in the continuing development of Visual Lint - an ATL/WTL/COM based add in product for the Microsoft Visual Studio and Microsoft eMbedded Visual C++ development environments.

Visual Lint uses the extensibility model of Visual Studio to closely integrate the PC-Lint C/C++ code analysis tool within the Visual Studio environment. Analysis results produced by PC-Lint for each file are automatically generated, parsed and presented to the user in as the corresponding source files are edited.

As well as the Visual Studio automation interfaces and the ATL and WTL frameworks, the add-in makes extensive use of multithreading techniques to perform background analysis of source files, and uses XML and XSLT to produce HTML reports summarising the analysis results.

My role in the project included the development of the initial product concept, most of the design, development and pricing of the software itself, as well as ongoing customer support and continuing development for the product.

Summary: Engaged in order to support the continuing development of the nCompass Control (http://www.tandbergtv.com/productview.asp?n=40) suite of control and monitoring solutions.

nCompass Control is a server/client based suite of MFC and C# packages designed to control SNMP interfaced digital TV encoder, multiplexer and receiver equipment in digital television head end installations.

Duties included the investigation and rectification of defects (both customer related and internal), the addition of new features as required (notably to the nCompass Control Scheduler, Profile Manager and Server), and the identification of improvements which could be made to the software to improve functionality, maintainability,efficiency or usability.

Among the tasks undertaken was the integration of an ActiveX scheduling component into Director 5, a C#/Winforms application for managing conditional access content, and the modification of the Scheduler to remove duplicated content from the SQ Server database and increase speed.

Summary: Primarily involved with the design and development of the Pharos (http://www.sonardyne.co.uk/products/8025.htm) and Fusion (http://www.sonardyne.co.uk/fusion) suite of Long and Ultra Short Baseline subsea acoustic navigation products, although I also had some involvement with the software for the Seismic Integrated Positioning System (SIPS).

The Pharos/Fusion product is a large MFC/COM based Win32 application suite which provides services including:

• Calibration of the positions of arrays of beacons deployed as acoustic References on the seabed.
• Computation of the real time position of Surface Vessels and Subsea Vehicles using acoustic and other positioning inputs.
• Real time displays of the position of Surface Vessels, Subsea Vehicles, References, Waypoints and Fixpoints in graphical and text forms.
• Generation of HTML, CSV and text reports on calibration, positioning and other activities
• Supply of mission critical positioning data to external systems.

My responsibilities on the project were wide ranging, and largely focused on the development of the user interface and the services it requires – including a 3D hierarchical co-ordinate frame and shape definition model, the document itself and the Chart Display – a GDI based display which uses transformation matrices to display the constituent components of a loaded “job” with an optional DXF backdrop.

I was also largely responsible for the measurements model, Job Wizard, Calibration Wizard (which allows array calibration to be planned and data collected) and the Processing Tool (which computes Reference positions using measured range, position and heading data using a Least Squares Adjustment).

In the final year of my employment with the company I was closely involved in designing and developing several new products based on the existing software, but requiring simplified user interfaces tailored to the needs of specific markets.

This process required liaison with Product Specialists in each market area, and a thorough review of the existing user interfaces and their usability and applicability for each product. This analysis culminated in the development and presentation of a fully functional software prototype meeting the requirements of all 10 products in the range, using the same binaries and maintaining backward compatibility with previous versions of existing products.

Once the design had been accepted, the code from the prototype was merged into the main development branch without adversely affecting ongoing development.

Duties Included: Software architecture, design, development and integration and in-service support of existing products (software, automatic test equipment and instrumentation products).

Throughout most of my career with the company I also acted as a “technical consultant” for other projects, with primary responsibilities for systems design and software aspects. For example, I was actively involved in evaluating the field support/maintenance requirements of the Racal Communications/Siemens Plessey (Yeoman) consortium bid for the British Army Bowman contract and the systems design of the Racal-Dana 6121 Mobile Satellite Receiver Test Set.

I was also heavily involved in tenders for various other defence ATE programmes (most notably the Merlin, Attack Helicopter and Bowman programmes), including designing system and software architectures and writing elements of the proposals. Participating in these tenders gave me an appreciation of many of the other skills needed to manage a successful project, including project management, estimating and writing skills.

Summary: Senior Development Engineer responsible for leading a small team developing object orientated C++ (MFC based) Virtual Instrument and Virtual Super Instrument software for the radio frequency (RF) subsystem of an Automatic Test System to support the functional test requirements of the avionics for the RAF EH-101 helicopter.

The project was a collaborative one between Racal Instruments and GEC Marconi Avionics. As leader of one of the two system software teams and a system architect on the project my role included liaison with not only my opposite number and his team at Marconi, but also the other teams (applications, hardware and test environment run-time system software) within Racal and planning of the development.

This software was Windows NT based and provided the operator with facilities for interactive and network Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE) control of physical VXIbus (IEEE-1152) and GPIB (IEEE-488) controlled instrumentation within Automatic Test Equipment (ATE). It ran on an embedded VXIbus controller, interfaced via Ethernet to the host ATE controller, which hosted the Application Test Packages used to test individual items of avionic equipment and also controlled the low frequency portion of the ATE.

The technical design for the system was based upon that proposed in a feasibility study for a low cost deployable ATE system in which I had previously participated. During that study I was responsible for the design of the software architecture (and in particular the instrumentation run-time system and the virtual super instrument concept) and the corresponding elements of the final proposal.

In parallel with the avionics development above I was also acted as software technical consultant to another programme in which obsolete rack instrumentation within a defence ATE system was to be replaced with modern VXIbus equivalents, whilst maintaining full binary compatibility with code written for the obsolete instrumentation. My involvement in the programme was to define a software framework to meet the requirement and produce software prototypes to prove and demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed software/system architecture, together with the supporting project plans and costings.

I was also heavily involved with on the uplift of ATE systems used by the Army to support Tactical Radios. In addition to replacement of worn out components and wiring, the uplift also encompassed major changes to instrumentation and the ATE Controller, whilst retaining object code compatibility with application software designed for the previous build state of the systems.

My primary responsibility in this project was the design of interface hardware and embedded ‘C’ software for control of the new instrumentation, whilst retaining the original programmable interface.

Duties Included: Member of a team designing a new RF Frequency Synthesizer, with specific responsibility for the development of the Reference (Frequency Standard) System. Whilst working on this project I designed and implemented a software package for automatically deriving the control characteristics for PIN diode attenuators using an RF Network Analyser.