A brief history of Taquis

For the most part the signal analysis involved looking at correlations between the sound pressure field at the nozzle and the schlieren signal down-stream of the nozzle exit plane (both on and off centre line axis). At that time I had access to a Nicolet-660B FFT spectrum analyzer at and a 10MHz 286 PC with a data acquisition card attached. Being of an Electrical Engineering background I wanted to get my hands dirty (so to speak) and spent much of my time writing code in Pascal and 8086 Assembler to perform the types of analysis I required. Though the hardware spectrum analyzer was (it seemed at the time) very impressive, it wasn't an easy task to get hold of it's internal data for further post processing. In other respects too, it seemed much easier to me to write code to do the experiments that I required rather than wrestling with other hardware. In the end I found it necessary to write a correlator program (since the Nicolet only did circular rather than linear correlation), which later gained spectrum analysis functionality as well. That was the first variant of AtSpec which, at the time, was a DOS program written in Pascal and Assembler running on a 286. Given the type of technology available its performance was quite good. For me the DSP programming seed had been set. Here are some photos from that time.

After completing my research posting and gaining a Master of Engineering Science in my field of research I set about turning those ideas into a Windows based program, programming now in C++ but still maintaining Assembler where necessary. The first version of AtSpec was released in late 1994 : the year I moved to Sydney to take up a software Engineering position with Ci Technologies developing their SCADA package CITECT. Having a full time software Engineering position slowed development of AtSpec considerably. So much so that it took a further four years before version 1.5 was released. Between 1994 and 1998 most of my time was taken up with GUI design and coding of CITECT runtime spanning three major versions; that of version 5 taking up most of my time when overseeing a transition from a 'C' animation code base to a completely re-designed 'C++' implementation. In the beginning the work at Ci Technologies gave much satisfaction and brought on greater maturity in my own coding but finally the demands of the job pulled me too far from where I wished to go. In December 1998 we parted company and now I'm back in Tasmania and have completed a full re-write of AtSpec transforming the product in AtSpec version 2.0 : an Analyzer that has far better performance and accuracy, more functionality and range of application, is easier to use and has much greater scope for further development. 

Taquis has become the vehicle for the further development of AtSpec Spectrum Analyzer and the vehicle for diversification of the product range. With the release of AtSpec version 2.0 the AtOne Application Framework is ready for release and is now available free of charge along with the AtSpec Driver Development Kit. 

For my part, much in the way of change is still yet to come. Rest assured that change will come and we shall be there to make change for the better...

Paavo Jumppanen.

Paavo Jumppanen
Owner of Taquis