Re: success with RIT Mark IV

[Tom Droege <tdroege@veriomail.com>]

Michael,

Great news!  I assume that you got something that looked like an 
image.  The real test is to do a dark exposure of 50 seconds or so and see 
if you get things that look like cosmic ray hits.  Normally one also gets 
bright edges of the frame.
I am not sure that you had the rows and columns right in your last 
message.  It is 2037 rows and 2043 columns, I think.  But it could be the 
other way around.

Now the question is, if someone somewhere wrote some proper code, would the 
50 MHz computer do the job?  Seems to me this is pretty quick to 
test.  Write a loop in the language of your choice that does 8 Million I/O 
instructions reading out the memory and writing it to disk.  See how long 
this takes.  At 3 us per byte, this would take only 24 seconds.  This 
should be possible even with an old PC.  You don't have to abandon the 
complete QBasic code.  Just shell out of QBasic, run your special code, 
then shell back.  Should be easy for someone that knows how to write code. ;^)

Tom

At 10:47 AM 1/27/01 -0500, you wrote:

>   After bringing my own (fast) computer from home to school,
>swapping it for the slow computer, and trying to read out the
>camera, I found the same results as yesterday.  No luck.
>
>   Then, I started following your list of items to check.
>I tried to check the voltages -- seemed okay.  As I was examining
>the ADC board, I noticed that there were two connectors with cables
>attached, and one connector without a cable attached.  About twenty
>minutes later, it occurred to me that I might want to attach a
>cable to it :-/
>
>   Success.
>
>   This exercise did teach me one other thing, though: the old
>computer I have been using -- a 50 MHz 486 with 16 MB RAM --
>can control the camera, read out the chips, and save the data ...
>but it takes about 5 minutes to write the data to disk.  My new
>computer takes only about 1 minute.  Obviously, I'll have to find
>a computer faster than the old, old 486.
>
>   Thanks for the help!
>
>                                              Michael