TASS Mk IV electronics set arrived

[Chris Albertson <chrisja@jps.net>]

Tom,

As the subject line says.  Your two boxes showed up today.
I am going out of town this weekend so I will not have time to
do much with them other then find a power supply and clear out
some work space.

For the rest of you, I'll try and descibe what I have as I think
I am the first to be shipped any Mk IV hardware.  Tom sent me an
electronics set.  That is no mechanical parts, no optics and no
CCD, just a set of circuit cards and some cables.  Still it is a
pretty impressive amont of hardware.  The main unit is three
approximate 8 x 10 inch PC boards assembled onto a pair of 
24 inch aluminum rails to make one 10 x 24 inch board.  It is
chriscrossed with quite a few rainbow colored flat ribbon cables.
In a real Mk IV I assume it would be packaged diferently.  Maybe
in  10x10x3 metal box.  In addition there is a "full sized"
card that goes inside a PC.  It is a 16-bit ISA card.  This is
one of the few cards I've seen that will take up all of the space in
a PC's long, full size slot.  There are two sockets for SIMMS on
the card and one 16MB SIMM is installed.  There is a 25 pin
connector on the back of the card that connects with a long ribbon
cable to the 10 x 24 inch assembly.  Also included in the package
are a couple motors, a switch, power and data cables.

The above is enough now that I think I can write and test about 90%
of the software to control a Mk IV.  The first steps are to learn
how to comunicate with a STAMP and RAM Buffer Card.   
-- 
   --Chris Albertson             home: chrisja@jps.net        
     Redondo Beach, California   work: calbertson@logicon.com