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The telescope control computer (on the left hand side in the cabinet) assumes the existence of the Superior Electric Control system, and communicates with it over a 1200 baud RS232 line. The complete list of slot cards and their function follows. The order is left to right as viewed from the front of the computer.
- COM1: The RS232 line to the Superior rack
- CTM5: This is a counter/timer card from MetraByte. The leads coming from it are labeled RA, DEC. All telescope motions except slew are controlled using the Pulse at External Rate feature of the Superior Indexer Card. When a frequency is provided to the appropriate pin of the indexer card (either Right Ascension [RA] or Declination [DEC]), the motor will turn at half this frequency. The leads labeled RA and DEC, then, provide frequency outputs to the indexer cards. The CTM5 card also acts (internally) as the frequency generator for the filter wheel motion.
- MetraByte Multifunction Card (PIO-12): This card provides two eight-bit parallel ports. The cables provided have very different function. The cable labeled FW (25-pin DIN) contains output lines used to drive the stepper motor on the photometer filter wheel and input lines to sense the position of the filter wheel. It connect directly to the 25-pin DIN connector from CompuScope, which also routes power to the filter wheel. The cable labeled HP (9-pin DIN) contains input lines from the Hand Paddle. The cable labeled SM (9-pin DIN) drives the focus motor circuit for the secondary mirror.
- VGA : We use a Paradise VGA card with base memory.
The camera control computer has the following slot card assignments.
- National IEEE-488 GPIB IIa card. This card provides a SCSI port to the Photometrics Star 1 CCD camera controller.
- VGA : We use a Paradise VGA card with base memory.
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