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DACS: Design Overview | 
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Next: Overall Functional Design Up: Control Board Previous: Control Board Contents Design OverviewThe firmware in the control board needs to handle serial communications, analog-to-digital conversion, Pbus communication, and LCD output. Additionally, it needs to use all of these to provide a user interface. Figure 94 shows a modular view of the required functionality. While all of the low-level hardware communication functionality is relatively straightforward in concept, the user interface portion of the firmware is a bit more complex. For instance, a decision had to be made regarding exactly how much intelligence to embed into the controller itself, and how much to push to the software running on the host computer. To aid further expansion and improvement of the user interface of the control board, a ``master-slave'' approach was taken. It was decided that low-level user interface primitives shall be coded into the firmware, but the use of these primitives shall be dictated by the software running on a host computer. The only function breaking this paradigm is a minimalist interface for controlling the DACS mixer unit in the absence of a host computer.
Next: Overall Functional Design Up: Control Board Previous: Control Board Contents Steve Richardson 2000-07-06 |
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