CAMAC Progress Report

                      Week Ending: June 14, 2002
                               Week: 72


Tom Folkers:

Tom Sargent:
     1. The elevation tracking has been made more tolerant of negative 
        elevations. It will not drive the telescope lower than 1 
        degree elevation.  It is possible to direct it to an object 
        that is below the horizon and it will begin tracking it (in 
        elevation) as it rises above 1 degree.
     2. Began implementing the +-90 degree wrap in Azimuth into the 
        servo program. It previously would always keep the telescope 
        between 0 and 360. It is working in non-sun-avoid slew mode 
        and partly working in the sun avoidance slew mode.  So, it 
        still needs more debugging.

Pete Hubbard:

David Forbes:
     1. I have resurrected and made operational the old EPP mode AOS 
        interface system that was last working in December 2001. It 
        appears to be moving data from the A/D card to the PC at the 
        desired rate (130 KiloBytes/second) with about 70% free CPU 
        time for other tasks. This is under RTLinux with a hard real-
        time data reading task.
     2. There were two small changes required in the AOS driver code 
        to get the speed up: 
          A) A typo was preventing the code from reading data at the 
        specified duty cycle;
          B) the data read routine was doing many superfluous status 
        reads, slowing it by 30%.
     3. Other than those minor errors, the system appears to be well 
        engineered and is in a good position to be placed into service 
        this fall (assuming that we can get good data through it).
     4. I also inspected and touched up bad solder joints on the A/D 
        and FPGA cards, and found a backwards-by-design tantalum 
        capacitor on each of the A/D cards. The offending capacitors 
        have been replaced with new ones in the proper orientation. 
     5. Based on the good speed performance of this EPP system, I see 
        no reason to continue work on the ECP mode approach that Dave 
        Ashby was attempting.