The Microship Status Reports

Microship Status 11/30/93 by Steven K. Roberts

In This Issue:

Random Post-thanksgiving Updates
Questionnaire Status
Literature Received

Random Post-thanksgiving Updates
<burp> OK, *that's* over. While the world was vacationing, I was slaving away here in the lab (OK, OK, so maybe I did have a couple of Thanksgiving dinners and some out-of-town company and a bit of play, but hey, I worked, too... really!)
Random updates:
I built a "helmet-cam" to allow mounting of the Hi-8 camcorder atop an old Bell bicycle helmet, just for kicks.

Jason Corley wandered by and built an LM380-based audio amplifier board.
The shipment of 250 Univenture CD JewelPaks arrived.
John Studarus has the SPARCbook alive on the net at Scripps, and is working on some of the initial software that will make it the Microship's net hub. He came over last night and we had a long talk about networking, mail handling, and related issues... I'll do a whole article on this subject soon.

Andrea Woo and I packaged a stereo system for the office, and we now have a wide range of entertainment audio in both office and lab (TV, CD, FM, shortwave, MIDI, etc). I also purchased a small video/audio mixer for doing simple editing between the camcorder and the VHS deck.
I fired up the Icom 725 the other night and chatted with a few people on 40-meter ham radio, using the bike's dipole lashed to a chair on the patio. We really must put an antenna on the roof here in the engineering building -- any volunteers?
Dan Perry has started on the solar still project.

Frank Araullo picked up a case and SCSI cable for the Quantum disk drive while in Santa Clara over the weekend. The bad news came in two stages: first, the power supply was bad, so we used one of mine. Second, connecting it to the FX fried something in the FX, apparently seriously. I hate SCSI...
I've had extensive email contact with Ampro, and we've settled on a configuration for the host PC... now awaiting final approval and shipment. I believe it will be using a small Sharp color LCD that will also serve as a video monitor.
I

n a similar vein, I've been in contact with New Micros and am about to send them my wish list. The study completed so far has led to a couple of suggestions for additions to their product line, including simple low-power multidrop-point nodes that merely pass through a serial port (it can be done now with V25-based boards, but they draw 50 mA). As is, we may be adding a small serial crosspoint for random devices... still puzzling over the best configuration here.
The blackboard in my lab now carries a big convoluted drawing of the whole Microship network and control system, and I'm working tonight to get it into MacDraw. We're actually about to the point where we can sit down and discuss detailed information flow and look at task partitioning... I might distribute copies of the drawing once it gets past Rev 01. There will be some kind of group presentation once I feel the overall architecture is solid and we can start carving it up into specific projects with firm design goals.

Questionnaire Status
I distributed a piece of email with 10 questions last week (only to UCSD students, the rest of you can ignore this paragraph). The deadline for replies is December 5... I have so far received 22 responses out of 54 recipients. This information will not only help us form teams and assign projects, but will also let us drop the names of those who are not responding. So if you want to be involved, please take a few minutes to let me know by answering the questions. Thanks!

Literature Received
A massive box of stuff was delivered from my base office over the weekend, and I won't bore you with details. Of note, there are recent copies of ham magazines, as well as the usual deluge of general office/business/supply catalogs and various 'zines. As always, if you need any kind of info relevant to the project, ask here first. Better still, if you want to help ORGANIZE all this, I could use about 8 hours of help, in chunks of about 2 hours, to bring the literature files up to date and try to get the magazines under control.
General Magnaplate literature on synergistic surface enhancements for metals exposed to corrosive environments (including Tufram).
Seda kayak catalog (a local builder).