The Microship Status Reports

Microship Status 2/6/94 by Steven K. Roberts

Quickies In This Issue:

Ampro Pc Is Up
AuXBAR INTERFACE CIRCUITRY
Forth Network Leds
Electronics Flea Market
SeXBAR FABRICATION AND BEHEMOTH CANNIBALIZATION INTERNAL FRAME STRUCTURE
Mosaic Online Project Documents
CU-SeeMe AND GLOBAL SCHOOLHOUSE PROJECT
Book Projects
Nrl Base Office Needed!

Life is a blur of meetings, interrupts, hardware projects, business issues, and the impossibly prolific spontaneous generation of items on TO-DO list. This report will reflect all that by taking the form of a whirlwind update...

First, the Ampro PC is working! As of the last report, we were still scratching our heads, wondering why there was no display. A conversation with the sponsor revealed that we were using the wrong kind of monitor (it needs VGA with DB-15 cable), and borrowing the correct one brought it up immediately. Unfortunately, we're working from 5.25-inch floppy and now need an IDE hard drive for the development system since the one from the junk box doesn't seem to work. Frank Araullo has a line on a used 40 meg unit, and we'll be trying it this week. Note that both the monitor and the drive are temporary -- the ship will carry a Sharp color TFT LCD and a PCMCIA flash mass storage system for minimal power and maximal reliability.

This weekend I worked with Jason Corley on the Audio Crossbar system, installing zener diodes on the analog boards to allow the 8816 chips to run safely from the +/- 12V op amp supply, populating the boards with chips and a few missing caps, making the split ribbon cable, and building the interface logic on the processor board. This last was the most time-consuming, and I finished it today from Jason's schematic. We're now ready to begin initial tests of the AuXBAR -- the first of the control network projects to be interfaced and brought online.

By the way, I'm adding an LED to each of the 15 FORTH boards on the network, driven by a transistor connected to port A, bit 3. This is what enables the RS-422 drivers onto the net, and the LED will show communications activity. This should let us see at a glance the operation of the protocol, as well as spot a board that's hogging the bus or is never selected.

Agnes and I went to the monthly ham/electronics/computer flea market at the Santee Drive-In Saturday morning. While paltry by Silicon Valley standards, it did provide a nice alternative to the other local parts resources. I spent about $40 on tools, wire terminals, heat shrink, diodes, and other odds 'n ends. I've been spoiled by doing the bike project in the Bay Area, with Halted and other resources available daily. Now I've been reduced to mail order <shudder>, and we're awaiting an $85 Digi-Key shipment that has a few projects on hold.

The serial crossbar fabrication was begun by Dan Sebald, using point-to-point wiring on perfboard. This is way ugly (through no fault of his), and since this is a board that is critical and likely to be subjected to considerable handling for the next decade I've decided to commit my first act of BEHEMOTH cannibalization. An R-N Quick-Connect prototyping board is in the WASU, unused, carrying the trailer control processor that hasn't seen power in about a year. It's just too useful a resource to leave in that dormant state, so we'll extract it and slice off a section for SeXBAR use.

An encouraging meeting took place today with Robb Walker and the internal frame structure team (TJ Tyler and Jeff Klompus). TJ and Jeff presented Robb with the TAD (toothpick-aided design) model of the frame, and they spent about an hour discussing the structural requirements of this critical component. As you may know from earlier discussion, we have decided to separately construct the hull and frame -- the former to handle flotation and hydrostatic loads, the latter to support the dynamic torsional loads of trailering, sail forces, outrigger attachment, and so on. Final assembly will permanently integrate the two. There are transverse planes in the frame coincident with bulkheads, and these are where the masts and outriggers attach. Anyway, TJ and Jeff are now well into the Mentat (Finite Element Modeling) learning curve, and the meeting with Robb confirmed that they are on the right conceptual track. We should see some interesting results here by the end of the quarter.

I also met today with John Studarus and Frank Araullo, who are both involved in the electronic publishing aspects of all this. We are working on bringing the WWW and Gopher servers (on nrl.ucsd.edu) up to date, with some big plans for a fully integrated hypertext documentation system as well as the requisite multimedia demos including images, sound, and film clips. Frank is working on linking the Microship Control System diagram to a library of documents that will allow the user to simply click on any item of interest and see a description of its function and current status. We're also trying to decide whether to place the full ongoing library of these status reports on the server, since the Nomadness Notes are published so infrequently that they hardly qualify as "updates."

Speaking of interesting networking tools, I accompanied Jean Polly on Friday to Jefferson Junior High in Oceanside. This is where Yvonne Marie Andres is using Cu-SeeMe to develop the Global Schoolhouse Project -- kids around the world linked via live multichannel video conferencing. It's quite impressive to see a Mac screen with a half-dozen active monochrome video windows from various sites logged onto a reflector, and we spoke with my contact at NSF about their funding a Video Spigot for the Microship lab to allow the schools to periodically look in on the activities here. This will of course move to the water, with the conferencing tools (albeit bandwidth hobbled) augmenting our environmental data blocks, video still frames, and text updates.

Other text projects are moving ahead as well. I've established a relationship with a new literary agent to represent me on the various projects, and Bobbi Smith has completed the edit of Miles With Maggie, the sequel to Computing Across America. This is now posted on the Mosaic (WWW) server, although the Gopher and FTP sites still have ancient versions.

Finally, I'm putting out the word with some urgency that I'm in need of a new base-office manager. Barbara Chase, who has quite capably managed NRL for two or three years, is moving on to other projects and a new house, and we urgently need someone, reasonably stable and preferably near San Diego, to take on the home-based job of running this business. This will include mail-order, media management, photo archiving, daily email contact, and the myriad tasks that hold a complex enterprise together. If you know of anyone net-literate, savvy in the ways of business and publishing, generally available during business hours, and free to work part-time on a percentage basis instead of fixed salary, please let me know. This may be expanded to include coverage of other freelancers who may travel with me (the flotilla), as well as a commercial net-linked home-base support service for techomads.

Cheers from the lab...

Steve