Veritas Dgc Inc.

Qsound Labs, Inc.

Don Lafont

Danny D Lowe

Mark Williams

James Roy

William Gonnason

Scott Willing

Darin Silvernagle

A vehicle control unit is disclosed which can be coupled between a tachometer sensor and an electronic ignition system on a vehicle. The unit is also coupled to a speedometer sensor to measure the vehicle's speed. The vehicle control unit limits the vehicle speed by modifying the tachometer signal from the tachometer sensor and providing the modified tachometer signal to the ignition system. The tachometer signal is a pulse train which is used by the electronic ignition system to determine ignition timing. The vehicle control unit limits both ground speed and engine speed by suppressing pulses from the original tachometer signal to prevent the combustion of fuel and thereby reduce engine power when the ground or engine speeds exceed predetermined limits. The vehicle control unit is microcontroller-based and preferably includes a logging function and an acceleration sensor. The microcontroller is coupled to the acceleration sensor to detect the peak accelerations experienced by the vehicle. The microcontroller stores peak accelerations above a predetermined limit, along with excessive ground and engine speeds, as part of a fault record a nonvolatile memory. The records can be examined by management personnel to identify reckless vehicle operators. Corrective action can then be taken to protect personnel and equipment. A handheld programming unit is also disclosed herein for programming the predetermined limits and for retrieving fault records. The programming unit can display and summarize fault records, and can be used to transport the fault information to a central computer system for archiving and more extensive analysis.

Safety limiter for powered vehicles

A battery charger system providing increased reliability over conventional chargers includes one or more charging modules coupled to a central controller module. Each charging module is cable of charging one or two batteries and includes control logic that controls the charging current provided to each battery. Each charging module is capable of charging the associated batteries using a pre-programmed, selectable charging protocol. The control logic included in each of the charging module provides a &ldquo;first level of intelligence&rdquo; for charging batteries. The controller module provides a &ldquo;second level of intelligence&rdquo; that generally operates in conjunction with the first level of intelligence provided by the charging modules. The second level of intelligence provided by the controller module individually enables and disables charging to a particular battery by an associated charging module. The charging modules are capable of charging batteries even without control from the second level of intelligence. Thus, reliability is increased by being able to continue battery charging even if the controller module fails or is removed from the battery charging system. Other features such as the lack of battery voltage sense lines removes the possibility of failure due to faulty or damaged sense lines, thereby increasing reliability.

Battery charger with improved reliability

The sound field in a stereo reproduction system is enhanced by a preprocessor that removes a portion of the audio information that is common or substantially common to both the left and right stereo input signals before processing the signals in left and right sound placement filters. The left and right placement filter output signals, from which a portion of the common audio information was previously removed before processing, are added to the right and left stereo input signals, respectively, to produce enhanced sound field stereo output signals. The input signals that do not undergo placement processing can be delayed in delay filters to improve coherency when the signals are added and both the placement filters and the delay filters can be implemented by a series of cascaded bi-quadratic filters.

Stereo enhancement system including sound localization filters

Growing community of inventors

Calgary, Canada

Don Lafont