Re: TASS Mk IV electronics set arrived

[Tom Droege <droege@wwa.com>]

Chris and all,

Just a comment on the packaging.  There are four boards in the Mark IV 
set.  Chris has only three at the moment.  The remaining card controls the 
TECs.

The four cards are mounted top and bottom of each lens tube.  You can see 
how this is done by referring to the Show and Tell notes.  Once mounted, 
there is a sheet metal cover that goes over the boards to keep off bird 
droppings and the like.  But they are not tightly covered, if it rains they 
will get wet.

Tom Droege



At 12:53 AM 6/23/00 -0700, you wrote:

>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