Mark IV Electronics Design

[Tom Droege <droege@wwa.com>]

This is mostly a reply to Grzegorz Pojmanski who is interested in using the
Mark IV electronics.  I am posting it to the group as there may be general
interest.   The status today is that there are rough drawings for everything.
The connector details have not been worked out.  All the labels of signals 
between boards have to be determined.  We started board layout today.
This is the second generation design.  The first is working on the bench
if I can remember all the things required to turn it on.  Note that the big 
change has been going from a design that required a computer for each 
channel to single computer, four channel design.  

The Mark IV electronics will consist of 5 "logical" printed circuit boards. I
may  package these as one or two physical printed circuit boards.  If one, it
would be about 10" x 20".  It is usually cheaper to make a single board if
my vendor does not barf at the size.  In any case, it will be laid out as 
5 boards and pasted together as needed.

The boards are:

Stamp
Scanner
ADC
Motor
TEC
Memory

These boards will all now live in the telescope housing.  This greatly reduces
the number of cables that have to go from the telescope to the control room. 
The disadvantage is that the electronics now must operate at telescope 
temperatures.  I figure -20 C to +30 C.  Someone might let me know what the
20 year low temperature is at the observatory of your choice.

Stamp

The stamp board is the control center.  It receives commands over an RS-232
cable from the control room and controls everything else.  It contains:

1) A 32 channel 16 bit data system to measure all the important voltages and 
temperatures.  

2)  16 each 8 bit DACs.  These are used for CCD clock levels, offset
adjustments, RA drive speed trim, and temperature commands for the TEC.

3)  24 Output pulses.  These can be used to set registers, start and stop
things, and drive model airplane servos who's position is proportional to
pulse width.

4) An 8 bit bi-directional data bus.  This is set up to have 16 logic level
sense 
channels as well as being the way to load 8 bit registers for various
purposes. 

Scanner

This board receives start and stop pulses from the Stamp board and generats
the necessary clocks (under PROM control) to scan a CCD chip.  There are 8
pulse channels for the Vertical scan and 16 for the horizontal scan.  It is
set up for one program of 128,000 steps or two programs of 64,000 steps.
A 64k step program would allow 32 micro steps for each pixel read during the
horizontal scan.  Sounds like a lot, but one quickly uses them up.  On can get
down to 100 ns or so micro step width, though 200ns is the more practical 
limit.   The plan is (at the moment) to use one program to read out the whole
chip and a second for focus.  Read out time for the whole chip is 40 seconds.
We might read out the center area of the chip in 1 or 2 seconds for focus.

Note that there is no provision for binning.  We have not provided the clocks
that are needed.  This would be a whole new design. 

ADC

This board contains 4 ADC channels.  The first version will use a 10 us ADC 
chip, the ADS7805.  This chip is cheap, works well, and has a 16 bit
resolution if not 16 bit accuracy.   The four channels drive produce 8
bytes of data per pixel
scanned from the four CCDs simultaneously.  Note that there is no provision
to scan one chip while exposing another.  All the CCDs must be exposed and
read out at the same time.  If alternate exposure and read out is desired it
will require a second set of electronics, and probably a second computer
to receive the data.
The electronics is not a big expense on the scale of things.  Much lest
than the cost of a CCD chip.

The ADC board drives a DB-25 cable that connects to the Memory board.

Motor

The motor board contains a bunch of misc. stuff that does not conveniently go
anywhere else.   The stepper motor drives are bi-polar drives with current
control.

This means they have a built in current sense and turn off the current so
is free wheels when it gets to some limit.  This makes for a very
efficient stepper motor drive with faster response than the common 2R
system.  The chip is rated at 45 volts and 1000 ma, but I would not get
very close to this limit. Some of the things it contains:

1)  A VCO and RA drive stepper motor.  The VCO is set by a pot and trimmed by 
a DAC under program control.  A temperature sensor on the board will allow 
trimming the VCO to hold it constant under temperature.   There is no good way
to get a fast measure of the VCO frequency.  I will bring a cable back to the 
control room so it can be monitored and trimmed using a frequency meter.  One
can also do it slowly using the PC clock.  The problem here is that The
only way to get time information back to the PC is through the RS-232 line.
This means something not so good time wise in both the Stamp and the PC.
So I can't promise how well this will work.  One can always just take a
long time to make the measurement.

2)  Five additional stepper motor drives.  Run under program control from
the Stamp.

3)  Eight Model Airplane Servo drives.  Four are used for the shutters.
The rest are available for things that can be done with a shaft that makes
roughly a 180 degree rotation.  The rotation is proportional to pulse width,
about 1 degree steps can be made.  Motors are available with response times
of 150ms for 60 degrees, and torques up to 200 Oz In.

4) 16 logic level sense inputs.  We will provide 4 pin connectors that
convently drive the common IR LED/Light Sensitive Transistor devices.  One
just needs to stick some sort of vane between the poles of the device,
and it will sens it.  On can reliably detect a limit position to 0.001"

5)  An 8 bit control register.  I plan to use four of these lines to
provide 4 switched AC outlets on the side of the telescope housing.
One to turn on the TEC high current power supply, one to turn on the
cooling water pump.  This leaves a couple to power AC motors to do
things like open the dome.  There is no problem switching
a killowatt these days with available SCR switch modules.

6)  I will probably double up the connector to this board from the stamp.
This will allow building the interface of your choice with the 8 bit
bus and available control pulses.

TEC

The TEC board contains 4 power amplifiers and comparator circuits to drive
the TECs in the camera head.  It receives DAC temperature commands and
feedback signals from the thermisters in the camera head and drives the TEC
appropriately.

Memory 

The memory board is 32 Mbyte board which can be expanded to 64 Mbytes.  32 is 
probably enough memory for three channel systems where we will start.  This
board lives in the PC.  It is read out over the I/O bus.  It can interrupt
the PC, but otherwise it is a pretty simple board.  It can have its memory
address set to zero, and can accept bytes over the cable.  It automatically
advances each time it gets a byte. If it gets out of sync with the data,
that is just tough.

Cables

With this design, there are only two cables between the control room PC and
the camera.  One also needs AC power and a cooling water pond at the camera
site. I expect the system to work fine with 100' cables.  There is no real
limit. I think you can go 1000' feet or so with a properly designed RS-232
signal.  One might have to slow down the read out for very long cables.
But this is possible to do.

I have worried about sensitivity to lightning.  We will see if I have
worried about the right things.
----------

Grzegorz is planning to run a telescope of his own design.  So he has asked
questions about how he might operate.

I will probably package the Stamp, the Scanner, and the ADC on one printed
circuit board, and the Motor and TEC on another.  Running a camera head
separately would then only require the Stamp combination board since
the controls would be elsewhere. The TEC could just be driven manually.
In actually fact, the boards will be quite cheap
once in production on the scale of things.  Grzegorz will probably want the
full  compliment,  just because it might be useful to have one of the
features on the motor board.  One can always leave most of the parts
out for the small saving in parts but larger savings in stuffing labor
and testing.

Tom Droege