About AsTec

AsTec is a small UK based company that produces electronic products primarily for, but not limited to, use by the radio control model boating fraternity. During the 1998 season AsTec were proud that 19 of the UK model boat speed records were held by models using  AsTec controls.

Astec Owner - Allan Shillitto with his 20 cell UK Record Breaking Cat.

Astec was formed in 1995 after the break up of Model Electronic Services (M.E.S). Astec retained title to the forwards only fast electric speed controller circuitry. Our first task was to re-design the layout of this product and re-issue it with some improvements. Since stocks were running out this was an urgent task. Thanks to the support of John Brinkler Astec products became available to the general public via his retail outlet (sadly no more).Astec has grown from those humble beginnings until today when we now offer a range of estimate that 90% of conventionally motored fast electric boats in the UK are powered by Astec speed controllers as are a growing number of scale models.

Today Astec manufactures and supplies a large range of products for model boaters (speed controllers, power relay switches, power solid state switches and soft switches etc.) and can also source a large range of other related products such as cells, connectors, motors (performance and scale).

The Pages:

These pages was originally created on an Amiga 1200. Whilst it worked extremely well on the miggy with VoyagerNG it would not work on the PC with Netscape or IE4 as they seem extremely picky. To solve these problems I was forced to use Frontpage hence all the bumf in the HTML. Most of the graphics originated on the Miggy including the original background which I could not re-create on a PC (or even edit as it went strange!!). The software used was PPaint 7.1 (buttons, graphics and animation, animated GIF's are produced by an AREX script via a program interface available on most miggy programs - and available as a button in the application). HTML originally from Wordworth 7 (Though newer pages have been imported from word 7 docs (more work but faster)). Scanning was done on a PC. Recently I have updated the background to give a cleaner look - though the old background still lives on my Amiga as it's equivalent to wallpaper.

All the PCB layouts were originally done on my trusty Miggy (A1200 in a power tower with 1.2gig disk, viper 30/50 accelerator with 16mb memory (never more than 3meg in use!!), 2 speed scsi cdrom, and 20 speed ide. This also ran all my other critical applications. Today most of it is done on my PC but some image work is still easier and faster on the miggy - JASC Paintshop Pro can import the images easily. I moved all my documents to the PC here they the same quality but 3 times larger files.

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A Note on Microcontrollers:

A Micro-controller is a microprocessor with program and other memory and functions embedded within it. They allow a previously unheard off flexibility. Manufacturers write programs specifically for the micro-controller that they have selected and then burn that program in to each micro-controller before or after construction of the main circuitry. Most micro-controllers are static. Some can be electronically reprogrammed. They are available in a vast range of speeds and capabilities.

The item that we use is a PIC micro controller, programs can be easily written and tested in an integrated package on the PC. When satisfied with the PC version we burn the test program in to A UV erasable version and move to bench testing. The development cycle continues until we are happy with the program. Sometimes an enhancement is asked for or thought of and this can be fairly easily provided by reprogramming. In fact the Servo-Slo started out with much of the same program as the speed controllers and the base board for the mixer!

Many of our competitors take a cost approach to the use of micro-controllers, this leads them to use a 4 Mhz controller with an internal clock. We use a more expensive type of Micro-controller that runs from a 16 Mhz resonator. This provides an extremely accurate and stable clock running at four times the speed. The extra speed allows us to provide better sampling and higher frequency output. The best we could do with 4 Mhz clock was a 1 khz output.

The human ear is very sensitive at this frequency and easily picks up what is soon an annoying whistle (About the same tone as the TV shut down signal). At 3-4 khz this sound is nowhere near as annoying and the efficiency is increased. We elected to go this route to provide the quality that we know you want.