Status Report for May 2002

[Tom Droege <tdroege2@earthlink.net>]

Status Report for May 2002   Tom Droege

The big news of the month is that Dan, Merle and I have found the problem 
with the Memory boards.  It was an improper reset sequence generated by 
miss-drawing of the logic.  Once the proper sequence is performed, the 
memory boards just work.  At least the "good" ones work.  Some still need 
to be fixed.  But it now appears to be possible.  This is a real weight off 
my mind.  I now know how to do things to make more systems run.   It is 
just a question of working through the details.  No more mystery "a good 
system suddenly stops working" problems.  I hope!

We built a nice test fixture so that we could uncover the Memory board 
problem.  I bought a computer cart and we put a computer on it with a I/O 
board so that we could write test patterns into the memory.  Just figuring 
out what we needed to do solved the problem since we had to take time to 
really learn how the memory board worked in order to design tests for 
it.  As usual, setting up to really solve a problem solves it.

45 CDs were generated during May by TOM1.  The stack is now 524 high.  On 
average, I seem to get a new variable from each pair processed.

ROB has been moved out on the porch and many things seem to work.  I was 
stopped from getting first light by the lack of a good camera.  I will have 
to go to work on the dozen or so potentially working cameras sitting in the 
basement.

We have started setting things up so that we can run TOM2.  Everything is 
there, I just have to try to make it go.

This has been data analysis month.  Michael made the last necessary fix to 
the pipeline, and I have been running disks through it.  I am about 60% 
through the accumulated data stack.  I picked a not so modest sub set and 
wrote it to CD and sent out 26 copies (so far).  Since I picked a dense 
field, it turned out to contain about 25% of the stars measured for the 
engineering run.  We are finding lots of new variable stars in the data on 
this CD.  It will no doubt point to improvements to be made.  A brief 
analysis of the data quality is in TN-83.