16 Mar
2010
16 Mar
'10
1:06 p.m.
I don't know - having seen your place, I can
imagine you having some kind of
You've seen a very small part of it ;-)
launch vehicle in there somewhere. Possibly under a
pile of other things, and
you've forgotten that you have it... ;-)
Err, no. All i have is a satellite simulator, and I know where that is.
This is not a joke. I have a box of electroniucs that was controlled by a
PDP11/10 that was dersigned to simulate the behaviour of a small part of
a satellite's electrical system so as to test an experiment that was
flown in said satellite. It's a 6U crate of boards (quite simple) and a
couple of DEC connector blcoks contianing flip-chip cards (there's
certainly an M105 address decocer in there) for the Unibus interface. Oh,
IO also have the trays of paper tape software for it.
It's a shame about the magazine, though -- they
published some pretty=20
neat projects, all of which could be built from parts available from=20
Indeed. I built many of them over the years. I rememebr watching
commetical for NICAM televisions using the Maplin NICAM tuner/decoder kit
and a greenscreen monitor :-) I gave up
Circuit Cellar and then Elektor when they both became 'yet
another microcontroller project' magazines. As you well know, I have
nothing against microcontrollers, but I don't think they're the _only_
solution.
There's just something... boring about them, somehow. And I know I shouldn't
think like that, because they're not so different
to a lot of the 8-bit stuff
that I grew up with.
Tjhe main difference for me is that in general the program store address
and data buses are not accessible (Ues, I am well aware that come
microcontrollers can be run with extranl program memory, but an lot
can't). Which means my methods of debugging machien code -- that is using
a logic analyser hooked up to said buses -- is impossible. Trying to get
soemthing working when you can't investigate the behaviour of a major
subsystem is not pleasant.
-tony