I am cleaning out a box of old gear here and ran across an interesting
doo-dad... a Vaisala "MPT 11" - what seems to be a "manual papertape
reader" - smallish PCB with a U-shaped plastic tape guide for what I
think is reading in the calibration papertapes for Vaisala sondes
(when launching a balloon, certain models of sonde have a papertape in
each one that gets fed into the telemetry box prior to launching). I
googled for a few references, but only turned up part numbers, no
technical docs. Not really surprising for embedded stuff from 1999.
There are other things in the crate - what look to be
single-Euroconnector-attached
boards with embedded GPS receivers, etc. (also from 1999). One CPU
board looks to
have an 8031 at 7.mumble MHz, and there's a DC-to-DC converter or two
on the same
sized boards. Probably from a rack-mounted telemetry box they used to
have around
here.
I also have small box of the GPS units from the sondes themselves -
helical copper wire antenna sticking out of an RF shielded board.
There's a 3 or 4 wire interface, two leads of which go to an 8-pin SMT
78L05, so power should be easy to trace, the remaining lead or two is
going to be some format of serial data, probably TTL, the only
question is what format the data are in.
If anyone has or knows of a Vaisala technical docs repository, I'd
love to hear about it.
Thanks,
-ethan