Heurikon Historical Highlights A series of articles for The Horizon by Jeffrey Mattox The MLZ-DAQ — Madison Water Utility Some of our old products were not major stars — a few were dead ends or just plain unglamorous. One of those not-so-glamorous products was the MLZ-DAQ. We designed the DAQ as an inexpensive, general-purpose, data acquisition board. It was a Multibus® I board with 32 digital I/O bits, a 32-channel analog-input multiplexer, and a 12-bit analog-to-digital converter module. It used static RAM, so we were space-limited to including only 1,024 bytes of memory. What does make this board notable, however, is that most of the MLZ-DAQs we sold back in 1978 are still in operation — and right here in Madison! In fact, you are dependent on a Heurikon MLZ-DAQ to meet many of your daily needs. Like many of our early products, The MLZ-DAQ was engineered with a particular customer in mind. In this case, it was designed for the City of Madison Water Utility. They wanted to install a control center that would be connected to the 26 water pumping stations around the city. This would permit the utility to monitor water pressures, tank levels, and various status signals, and to control water pumps, all from a central location. Their system design engineers met with us and we used their specifications to design the board. The telemetry system was put into operation in the early 1980s and has been working fine ever since. Even though there are about 32 processors in the city’s inventory, we haven’t been asked to make any service calls or repair any processors. This is because the city is doing their own maintenance. That’s probably just as well, since no one in our service department claims to remember much about this particular board. Although we only sold a few hundred MLZ-DAQ boards, that microcomputer board stayed on our price list for years. Every time we considered dropping it, some impoverished customer, such as AT&T or Boeing, would decide to order a few. The water supply for our building comes from the old pumping station on Mineral Point Road (near the high school) or the new station atop the hill on High Point Road. During the winter, the city pumps 30 million gallons per day to its customers — and 45 million gallons per day during the summer. Although most of the utility’s sites have a deep well pump and a huge water storage tank, a few locations have storage tanks only. At night, or when the overall water demand is low, the utility allows water to flow in reverse, thus refilling those storage tanks from the water mains. Also, since the water mains are all interconnected in a giant underground grid, numerous pumping stations can be off-line or under repair at the same time — and we won’t notice. When you turn on your water faucet or drive past a city pumping station, remember that Heurikon computers are being used to help keep the water flowing. The City of Madison shares the honors with Oscar Mayer Foods and Cue-Nique Micro-Logic as having the oldest Heurikon products still in use. |
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