The Microship Status Reports

Microship Status 2/28/94 by Steven K. Roberts

IN THIS ISSUE:

CONTROL NETWORK WRAPUP THE VIDEO LCD

End of February already! We're only a week or so away from the end of the Winter Quarter, and things are intense... this quick update will wrap up the month and also the recent backbreaking weekend marathon of network code refinement with Bill Muench. CONTROL NETWORK WRAPUP Yes, it works. The multitasker has been refined with key code segments reduced to low-level, and it is almost three times faster under some conditions. Even more important, the Hub can be vigorously multitasking without affecting 9600-baud communications over the network -- as you may recall, the tasker was preventing timely service of the old software-driven NETLOOP program. Well, now we have a second ring buffer and an interrupt service routine that handles the network. Since this is the Hub's major role in life, this is a major step forward, but it came at a cost of about 12 hours in The Chair and my back is still paying for it... All this new code is compatible with the nodes, and at our liesure we'll drop it into their EEPROMs. At the moment, taking the network offline is dangerous since deadline approacheth for the 10 students remaining in the project class. When I can, I'll upgrade the hub to 64K of RAM. The net effect of all this, so to speak, is a very stable and FAST network of FORTH processors, seemingly expandable ad infinitum. The New Micros boards are solid, the multidrop network is noise-free, and Bill's code is brisk and efficient. This infrastructure will be with us for quite a while, so the next step is catching up with documentation so the next student team will have a stable spec to work with. THE VIDEO LCD I mentioned in the previous report that we have fired up the Sharp LCD on the Ampro system... sometime over the weekend, I cabled my Sony TR81 camcorder to the NTSC input, pulled the requisite control bit low, and VOILA! The most amazing little 6" color monitor I've ever seen! This is not at all what you'd expect from an LCD -- it looks like a small, high-quality TV set. With Tim Chen snapping photos, we did the usual video play (eyeball close-ups, feedback, and the like), and now it's time to integrate it with the video crossbar system that Delon Levi has almost completed. Progress! I'm pushing to get document NRL-401 out the door -- I've just agreed to exhibit BEHEMOTH at a computer show in Pomona in mid-March, and I want to have something to sell that's technologically more current than Computing Across America (in which I set out with a Radio Shack Model 100 and a 300-baud connection to CompuServe, then upgraded to an HP laptop and a blazing 1200-baud modem). A mercifully short update thus ends a mercifully short month...

Cheers! Steve