jason--
welcome... yeah, we had a number of folks join in the last couple
days. probably worth plowing thru th messages so far to get up to
speed.
your second question first: the general concept is to produce a PCB
board design that maximizes core functionality while keeping cost &
complexity low... folks can then implement as much of that
functionality as they want/need. not everyone will want everything.
as you say, 5u is pretty big, but that's based on implementing all
functions. i mentioned in another post an alternate implementation
of, say, a dedicated 4channel quantizer; in MOTM format that could
easily fit in 1u. i think the vision (or at least my version) is to
have a flexible core "brain", that could be used as the base for all
kinds of modules.
on the port thang: AFAIK the serial interface is the one supported
by the atompro chip (there was a long discussion that finally
settled on that as the core for this project); usb/firewire are
_considerably_ more difficult to implement. since there's an strong
interest in getting _something_ committed to copper in the short
term, there are some tradeoffs.
howerver, this is an open source project, and everyone's a volunteer
contributor--if you'd like to tackle an add-on that could convert
usb to serial, you're more than welcome (the display panel is going
to be an add-on, too). in the longer term, if this model of
community development seems to work, i can imagine additional
projects being undertaken in the same way... which kind of frees up
this one from being the be-all-end-all, in terms of features.
b
--- In
ComputerVoltageSources@yahoogroups.com, Jason Proctor
<jason@...> wrote:
>
> i'm not really up on what's going on with the concept, having
caught
> the beginning of this thread on sdiy and then lost it until a day
or
> two ago when i learned it had moved here. i have what may be
regarded
> as a few dumb questions.
>
> - does it have to be rs232 for the computer interface?
>
> i've not seen a serial interface other than usb or firewire on a
Mac
> in living memory, and i'd be surprised if it survives on PCs for
much
> longer. however, MIDI's going to be around for a while yet, and
> presumably USB for a while longer. can we have one of those
instead?
>
> - larry's PSIM layouts look pretty good. are all 8 inputs etc that
> people are talking about necessary or even supportable by the
> hardware platform? 5U MOTM is pretty damn big!
>
> as a software tweak and hardware klutz i'm kinda looking forward
to a
> module i can tweak...
>
> thanks,
> j
>