Status Report from Cincinnati, January 2002

Mike Gutzwiller

Most of my work lately has been writing my own Mark IV control software. As I've mentioned before the software will run under Windows 98. The software should also run under Windows ME but I've not tested it there. It will not run under Windows 2000 or XP since I would need to create a driver for those systems and that's too much work.

The preliminary version of the software will now perform all necessary operations. The latest additions have been:

• Adding ADC polling.
• Adding DAC control. I was very careful there to avoid setting the wrong CCD voltages!
• Adding image control. Image control includes exposures, reading the CCD and saving the images to FITS files.
• Modifying the Stamp communications to use asynchronous I/O. This makes it easier to recover from communication timeouts.

As part of the debugging process I've taken some bias images with good results. The readout error (1 sigma) for the two cameras was 5.0 and 5.7 ADU's which is equivalent to 12.5 and 14.2 electrons respectively. This is certainly well below the error that the background sky will produce at my site. I have noticed that there are subtle patterns in the bias images at the level of 2 ADU's. I am at a loss to explain these patterns, they may be interference induced. At any rate they're in the noise. interference induced. At any rate they're in the noise. Mike G.