Business Purpose: Reduce Risk in bidding projects requiring very accurate timing of pulses across remote distributed locations.
Background: Fault location on the electricity distribution networks is possible by timing noise spikes in multiple locations, and then inferring the location from this. The business problem is a low cost solution is required for measuring and comparing timing to a nanosecond accuracy across widely distributed locations.
Project Detail: This project was to explore the feasibility of synchronising multiple remote receivers by slaving them to GPS timing, and then having comparators to time noise spike to high speed counters, and retrieving this data to a central location.
Project Outcome: An outline of the embedded system design and software architecture was created, which confirmed the feasibility of doing this in a way that significantly reduced the implementation cost compared with existing approaches.
Follow Up: The concepts created have been discussed with the Electricity Supply Industry innovation process. This has yet to result in a contract for further development.