Monitoring safety

Austdac Pty Limited it is one of Australia’s largest suppliers of communications, gas and environmental monitoring, intrinsically safe lighting and conveyor control equipment to Australian coal mines and general industry. The company maintains its competitive edge through its R&D program and by applying a high level of technical excellence to the manufacturing and servicing of high-reliability electronic equipment for the Mining and General Hazardous Area Industry.

Austdac engineers use Altium Designer 6 to develop accurate yet extremely reliable equipment for testing and controlling critical industry infrastructure, such as the company’s Clearcomm Controller interface. The controller provides an interface between the Austdac underground voice communication system and the surface using a number of interfaces including PLC, SILBUS and MODBUS. Based on two sandwiched 2 and 4 layer PCBs containing a mix of low level analogue, power and digital circuits, the controller is used to monitor and log the system status plus PSA state and Evacuation Alarm Request via its front panel membrane switches and LCD.

"The advantages and time savings delivered by the Altium Designer Database Library made the effort of setting it up well worth it. It has reduced our time to generate BOMs from up to a week to less than 30 minutes and it has allowed Austdac to rationalize and consolidate the parts that we use on our designs to the point where we have reduced the number of parts by over 50%."

Peter Chan
Senior Electronics Engineer
Austdac Pty Ltd