Re: Too good to not mention...

On Mon, 16 Nov 1998 17:20:12 -0800, Clay Cowgill <ClayC@diamondmm.com> wrote:

>http://www.scenix.com/home.html
>
>You still out there Zonn? Here's the processor for that
>microcontroller-driven vector generator. Mouser (or maybe Digikey?) is
>now carrying Scenix parts in low quantity...
>
>(That's a link to a company making 100MHz -- 100 MIP PIC processor
>clones... :-)
>
>-Clay

Yup! I'm still here. I'm just now gearing down on the project from hell I've
been working on for the last year and a half. Hopefully the next project won't
be so damned time consuming!

I've followed this processor from the beginning, what I didn't know is that they
have brought the speed up to 100 mhz (I know of a guy who's was beta testing the
50mhz chips, and he says he's run them at 150mhz on the bench!!)

At 50mhz (set for 1 clock per instruction) I figure you could write the vector
draw routines in a 16 instruction loop, close, but if I recall I think it was
doable. Hell, with 32 instructions maybe even circles?? Ok, that might be
getting a little carried away, but in reality it could allow higher resolutions
steps.

The routines assumed two parallel DACs connected to two setable counters that
were simply incremented or decremented by a pulse from the Scenix part as part
of the loop. They included the code for different drawing times at different
angles to keep beam brightness uniform.

At this point the problem gets down to how fast a PC / MAC / SOMETHING can feed
data to the vector generator to keep it moving. (do you use a parallel port?
ISA? PCI?)

-Zonn

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Received on Mon Nov 16 20:12:50 1998