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Security Watch: Electronic Real Estate

I can hold my entire library of CDs, 45 records, and cassettes in one hand that's more than 5,000 tracks of music, and if I can ever convince my wife

Security Watch: Electronic Real Estate

Sep 1, 2004 12:00 PM,
By Steve Filippini

I can hold my entire library of CDs, 45 records, and cassettes in one hand — that’s more than 5,000 tracks of music, and if I can ever convince my wife about the importance of such an investment, I could hold another 5,000.

At roughly the size of a double-thick Pop Tart, my MP3 player has a hard-drive capacity of 40 GB. This marvel of ingenuity can be overshadowed only by the understanding that it was obsolete the moment I purchased it. Players now boast larger capacities with more features for less money.

THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING …

A similar transformation occurred in the security industry, too. In 1992, for example, an 18-by-18-inch multilayered circuit board populated with more than 100 integrated circuit (IC) chips provided the basic needs for home automation and security applications. The larger the circuit board, the more features you could add to it. Once it reached a size a marketing department deemed practical, it went to press, and the door to additional features was closed. If the marketing/engineering department needed to add a series of features or hardware improvements after production was well underway, minicircuit cards called daughter boards were piggybacked onto the electronics and wired in as needed.

Circuit boards used in security applications continue to shrink in size while enabling increasingly feature-rich control panels.

Field support was just as fancy. If I needed to upgrade the firmware of my panel, I pulled out my handy-dandy chip puller (pocket screwdriver) and carefully removed and replaced a 40-pin IC chip, taking those extra few seconds to ensure the notch was correctly oriented before applying power. All 40 pins needed to be properly aligned before the chip was completely inserted into its socket, or I was in for a lot of fun bending and reseating the chip. If I bent the pin out or under the socket, I prayed to the tech gods that straightening them out did not create a broken connection. When I was a field engineer, a lot of my calls from service technicians stemmed from their failing to turn off the power to the panel just prior to inserting the screwdriver into the socket and prying the chip out. The company I worked for ended up placing a sticker on the face of the chip warning that smoke was a bad omen.

A lot of panels still use the removable IC method for firmware upgrades, but the manufacturers wised up and redesigned the physical characteristics of the chip to make it almost idiot-proof. Instead of 40 sharp, easily bendable pins that needed laser guidance control to properly seat the chip into its socket, it’s now a small, square chip with rounded, nonmoving pins and a notched corner to ensure proper insertion. Well, it’s almost idiot-proof — I managed to put it in wrong. It took some time and effort, but I was successful in fitting it in the socket and powering up the system before my coworker caught the mistake. IC chips usually don’t provide telltale signs that they are blown. They just go to sleep and never wake up again.

THE MARCH OF PROGRESS

Another type of firmware upgrade is done through the magic of Flash technology and a telephone call. Want to make a few operational changes to the brains of a control panel? Call the alarm control panel and download the new strings of code before the customer comes in for the day. Once you receive the data kiss-off at the end of the call, you are ready to rock ‘n’ roll.

Not only that, the same feature-rich control panels are now accomplished with circuit boards the size of DVD cases. You might wonder how that is possible. It came together with the introduction of surfacemounted components and the ability to cram more stuff into smaller IC chips through advanced silicone and superconductor technology.

Microprocessors were getting faster, and silicone manipulation that compressed firmware requirements made it possible for the reduction in circuit board real estate. Power supplies that often heated up the inside of the alarm enclosure and melted the plastic sleeve that held the system’s documentation were replaced with switching power circuits. That enhancement reduced the need for large step-down transformers and bulky charging circuits. More power was readily available with less energy to create it, and the field technicians quickly embraced it.

Field technicians often complained that the power supply heat sinks were too hot to touch. My advice to them was to keep their fingers off of it. Nowhere in the documentation did it instruct them to place their hands on the power source.

Yet all neat innovations have drawbacks. I used to carry a large 3-inch-thick binder with schematics and engineering notes stuffed in it. Armed with that and a soldering iron, I could make field repairs to most panels that blew a resistor, capacitor, or power transistor without too much trouble. Those components were available through Radio Shack and saved the company money in the long run. Why ship a panel back for repair when it could be done over a lunch break, on-site? Of course, the introduction of surfacemount components took that option away. Although I could still remove them with my soldering iron, it was the replacement of the tiny part that twisted me into knots. It’s practically impossible to do and for good reason; no one is expected to repair them.

In fact, a large number of panel repairs for many of the smaller systems aren’t done by skilled troubleshooters anymore. Back in the day, our repair department was staged in a good-size room with full system schematics decorating the walls and desks. Every important circuit connection was notated with values and instructions to speed up the process of locating and correcting a panel malfunction. It took time, but it was done right. We even discovered an interesting statistic: 90 percent of all returned panels were free of problems before they were removed from their shipping materials. We had our share of lightning strikes and defective components, but in the end, most of them were simply cleaned up and restocked. Most field returns were missing fuses and removable components just prior to them being shipped back.

As the circuit boards grew larger and more sophisticated, my company broke down and purchased an in-line/in-circuit tester and left the driving to microprocessors. You placed the circuit board in question onto a large platter with hundreds of tiny pin connections beneath it and flipped on a switch. A large vacuum would pull the board down as the pins were pressed up and into the circuit board. Within the next few minutes, you were presented with a computer printout that identified the faulty circuit (to component level) and steps needed to correct it.

TIME IS MONEY

So if it takes only a few minutes to test large quantities of nondefective circuit boards, why throw them away? Simply put, they are built to be throwaway items. It’s cheaper to swap out the defective board with a new one than to try to troubleshoot it in the field or to pay for shipping to get it repaired. That might make financial sense, but it still bothers me to see it happen. Yet time is money, and money is the driving force in the decision-making process.

Steve Filippiniis a senior technician with more than 25 years of experience in the security and installation industry. E-mail him at[email protected].

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