By James D. Sullivan, Midwest Cable & Satellite, Inc.
The problems and opportunities of remote control are well documented by anyone who has wandered into the labyrinth of options and costs involved in even the most simple applications. Attempting to monitor, compile and display information from multiple monitoring points increases the complexities and costs exponentially. But, as active electronics increase, the costs of maintenance, potential failure and lost revenue also increase. As a function of limited personnel, and unsatisfied customers, we attempted to design a remote control and monitoring system. We have used the most available computers today, the IBM PC and PC Jr., and our data acquisition by "off the shelf" manufacturers. The software was mostly custom written using compiled basica and assembler as building blocks.