CAMAC Progress Report

                     Week Ending: October 19, 2001
                               Week: 38


Tom Folkers:
     1. More work on Digital Backend (DBE).
     2. Took a vacation day.

Tom Sargent:
     1. I got the new acquisition algorithm to work with the test set 
        up in the lab.  The lab system is so sluggish and spring that 
        it's difficult to infer how well it will work at the 
        telescope, but it appears to be it is working.
     2. I observed large amounts of noise (about 10,000 counts) on 
        encoder signals going in to 2 A/D different channels on 2 
        different occasions. In one occasion wiggling the connectors 
        fixed the problem. On the other, the A/D chassis had to be 
        powered cycled to fix the problem. This may be a problem with 
        the Traquair A/Ds, although we've never seen it before. I 
        discussed this with Pete who says he will look into it next 
        week.
     3. I altered the DSP software to make the assignment of encoder 
        signals to A/D channels dynamically changeable. It will help 
        deal with A/D channel failures like the ones we saw this week.  
        This was tested.  The servo side also now has a user interface 
        to view/alter the channel reassignments.  I am working on an 
        automatic mechanism to have it save channel assignments in a 
        file on disk so they will be remembered the next time the 
        system is started. 

Pete Hubbard:
     1. On Vacation All Week.

Dave Ashby:
     1. No Report.