Applied Sciences Group, Inc.

BUFFALO, N.Y. (WIVB) - Some University at Buffalo students are taking their assignment to a whole new level, and making a difference in the lives of the disabled.

UB students are visiting the Center for Handicapped Children Learning Center to brainstorm ideas for their next class project.

Tom Ulbrich's two sons left the area to find jobs. One works as a pharmacy resident at Ohio State University. The other is an investment banker in Manhattan.

Ulbrich runs two small businesses in Alden -- Mow More Landscape Supplies Inc. and Ulbrich's Garden Center -- and acknowledges there's a stigma about Western New York as a place not usually synonymous with jobs and economic prosperity.

A Buffalo medical device manufacturer has launched a pair of products designed to help reposition patients during surgery.

Company officials hope those products will better position the company as a leader in the medical products industry.

This is in recognition of its Timber 32 program suite that is designed around an innovative architecture and has resulted in a powerful tool in terms control and schedule functionality. The growth of the building energy management systems (BEMS) market is directly related to the advantages these systems offer to address the growing demand and cost of energy through energy conservation techniques. These systems give building operators far better control over buildings as well as more troubleshooting capabilities. The Timber software for energy management systems was developed in the early 1990s.

Today, ASG’s Timber 32 system functions as an integrated program suite in Microsoft Windows and can be used in monitoring and controlling functions in lighting as well as heating, ventilating and air conditioning (HVAC) applications. It is an open architecture system that does not limit or restrict the hardware that is used to monitor status, temperature or pressure metrics.

The Timber system works on the basis of an open system using Modbus and LonTalk protocols, thereby allowing it to be used with hardware from multiple vendors hence the systems flexibility. The customers’ requirements were kept in mind while designing the BEMS system and incorporating the Timber software. While this might prove expensive compared to closed systems initially, the long term advantages give open systems the edge. It also allows for easy future upgrades and expansions with lower maintenance costs and replacement of older hardware devices in a systematic manner, instead of a complete replacement. Timber 32 software is written primarily in Visual Basic with low-level device drivers written in C. The system features a user friendly interface and relies on a central processor that communicates to the various controllers and respective panels associated with climate control and lighting systems. The control functions makes real time data available about the status of the different devices, which is used by the BEMS to automatically control devices to reduce energy usage.