It was a good meeting with many subjects discussed. Highlights:
- Dick has the control box essentially finished. He has components and materials for all the rest of the motion servo hardware. This is a big deal and a lot of work on his part.
- He also has the necessary PLC modules, Lattice. Unfortunately, they have started charging $100 for a license for their software, which previously has been free. Dick is exploring ways around this charge, since he was told a while back that the software would always be free.
- Voltages available in the presently available power suppplies are
- 5v (10v unregulated),
- plus/minus 15v (22v unregulated)
- plus 40v
- plus 200v
It was not completely clear if these would be sufficient for the read/write, but Joe felt that supplemental power could be added to the r/w chassis if need be. So the above were determined to be the total of the servo power supplies.
- It was decided that the rad/write circuits and controls would be on a separate chassis, 19 inch, 2U high. This keeps the mechanical packaging of the motion servo and read/write separate for the simplification and convenience of all.
- The plan for a high level controller is still open. The motion servo initially will be controlled by address switches, but the design is such that the control can be passed easily to a PC controller or even a unique hardware design if that is the ultimate decision.
- There was considerable discussion about recruiting additional team members for the read/write design as well as the high level controller and programming. Al will follow up on some leads that he has.
- Dick and Dave will explore the possibility of Dave picking up a portion of the hardware build, most probably completion of the power supply, at some appropriate time in the near future.
Please revise this with anything that I may have missed or mis-stated. And let's keep in contact. I'll call a follow up meeting when it seems appropriate. Let me know if you think one is due.
Thanks!
Dave
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