Newsbyte: Linux to power Automated Rettreival System

ME dugan at passwall.com
Fri Aug 4 21:52:42 PDT 2000


Hello List,

(This is Linux related - trust me...)

SSU, ROHNERT PARK,CA -
Some of you may have noticed my lack of attendence at the installfests,
and meetings. Some of you could care less ;-) 

Over the past 18 months, I have been working on a project for our local
CSU system university, SSU. A new building has been built for the SSU
library and IT. Work continues on the building as people rush to try to
complete the building construction for the opening of the new school
semester. 

One part of the new building includes an Automated Retreival System (ARS) 
for the storage and retreival of books. I expect the media to get the
information on this part of our new library munged in some way, so this
message is a pre-emptive strike to their possible mis-information.

Our Automated Retreival System has 3 large cranes that are each 3 stories
tall. They can lift up to 750 Lbs each, and deal with the movement of
bins that contain books.

Viewing locations exist on the 2nd and 3rd floors of the north wing of the
new building at SSU.

At the heart of the Automated Retreival System, is an application to
control the cranes, maintain a database of items, bin locations, sector
locations, deal with pick requests, audits, and user interface. The
application is running on the OS that is the choice of the GNU generation
- linux. 

As far as I know, we have the first, and only Linux based Automated
Retreival System in the world. (I believe UNLV, and CSU Northridge both
use SCO UNIX.) I hope other locations follow our lead as they look to use
Automated Retreival Systems with their library.

If you would like to see more information on this, check out:
http://libweb.sonoma.edu/mike/ars/

(It even has 3 animated GIFs showing a crane in operation for those of you
that run netscape instead of lynx. Made with whirlgif, and optimized with 
the GIMP. All html pages written using emacs or vi, served with apache
on a Linux box.)

Daily updates on items being loaded into the ARS are also published in the
"story" section.

I also added it to the list of links at the bottom of my page:
http://libweb.sonoma.edu/mike/

like:
http://libweb.sonoma.edu/mike/macnc/
http://libweb.sonoma.edu/mike/fujitsu/
http://libweb.sonoma.edu/mike/networking/ (work in progress)

Until my next project...

Enjoy!
-ME




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