Phalanx Close-In-Weapon-System

Coda Octopus Colmek currently upgrades and sustains a major military weapon system. We routinely solve obsolescence issues through the redesign and production of VME chassis, backplanes, embedded computers, and other supporting electronics. We have also developed a remote monitoring system and various maintenance kits.

Coda Octopus Colmek has been supporting this military weapon system for over 17 years. A history and description of the work completed is as follows:

2004

Coda Octopus Colmek's initial tasking was the redesign and improvement of a VME chassis. This included:

  • Reverse engineering of legacy design to use more COTS components
  • Redesign of backplane, fan modules, and power supply
  • Added increased power routing as well as “hot swap” capabilities
  • Added redundancy

2006-2008

For these years, Coda Octopus Colmek was tasked to redesign and enhance a number of the VME cards, including a card cage. These included:

  • Three separate transition adapters
  • Media converter
  • Embedded computer
  • Optical hard disk drive
  • Video switch

2011

In 2011 Coda Octopus Colmek was asked to do more enhancements to the media converter card. Additionally, we were tasked with creating a maintenance kit. This kit included:

  • Custom interface card design
  • Interface designed for service technicians

2013

There were two main efforts this year. One was for more VME card and chassis improvements. These included:

  • Redesign of ethernet switch
  • Design of chassis frame connector

The second effort was upgrading the embedded computer. This required:

  • Complete redesign of the computer including new enclosure and increased performance
  • Windows 7 upgrade

2016-2017

For these years, Coda Octopus Colmek completed a number of card redesigns and enhancements which included:

  • VME transition adapter
  • Media converter
  • 100MB fiber converter switch
  • Fan assembly

Additionally, Coda Octopus Colmek created a new maintenance kit that included new cables and adapters. And as before, the kit was designed to be used by field technicians.

2020

Coda Octopus Colmek’s most recent work has been to perform an upgrade on the embedded computer to generate prototypes for field testing. This work included:

  • Windows 10 upgrade
  • Obsolescence redesign of the motherboard