Organization: Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, SWEDEN
Lines: 20
Nntp-Posting-Host: alf2.pe.chalmers.se
Hi netters,
here is a late addition to the "I use HyperCard for..." mailings. I work at the Dept. of Production Engineering at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden and a colleague and I have been using HyperCard for the last 18 months to teach and to do research in how to operate manufacturing systems.
Our own lab system is mainly built around a manufacturing cell with a handling robot, two numerically controlled (NC-) machine tools and a PLC for support and monitoring. Since all these machines only have an RS-232 connection, we hook them to our Ethernet through a Terminal server. The lab also have an automatic storage unit and will probably have an assembly cell and a system for moving workpieces between cells.
Students in the fourth and hopefully last year of their masters education get some hands-on experience in our lab, and the HyperCard part gets the highest marks! The task is to write a dispatching application that controls the flow of workpieces in and out of theNCs. With some support routines the students manage to do this in under four hours, and most of them have never heard of HyperCard before! Absolutely impossible with C or Pascal, even if we used all time available for the course.
A more capable control package, with the working name HyperCell, has also been developed. This consists of a controller stack, a product database stack and a machine communications stack, all three communicating through Apple Events. Although still a rough prototype, this package has given a lot of experience in control algorithms, database structure, information handling and operator interface design.
The best thing with HyperCard is, in my opinion, that it is integrated, ie graphic interface builder, data handling, communications, scripting and other stuff is put into the same program and still is Mac-ish and easy to use. For example, it took me just two hours, including reading the Apple Event Primer and making a couple of stupid mistakes, to set up two stacks to exchange info through AE. Clickable, not cd C:\dbase\ and so on.
No flames, but I was disappointed when I read (some recent vaporware) that there will probably not be a color HyperCard. It is needed, as is more speed but even more important is what will happen to HyperCard in the future. The debate here recently about paying for HyperCard or not is pointless if the development of HyperCard is slowing down. What we should tell Apple & Claris is what features we would like to see in HC 3.0 AND how much we would pay for them.
I will gladly give more information about our work here at Chalmers, but only by e-mail since our workload is pretty high at the moment. If any of you are doing, or are familiar with, similar work, I am very interested.
