PS
The other reason I went into detail, is that keeping up with one set of keypads in real time is hard enough, but the possibility of having to keep up with 3 sets key pads in parallel is no small trick. I bet Ren??? is very glad that humans don't have 3 hands.:-D Push buttons are not trivial coding because of the switch bounce that every one of them have. I would think that Graphics touch screens process similar problems also. I also know that there is no hardware key de-bounce circuity in the graphics hand controller to assist. It all has to be done by the software. I know that Ren??? has spent several months trying to fix just the interactions that having 3 possible set of keypads has presented. He spent the last week alone making changes to the touch screens, giving users the capability to not only reverse the directions of the RA and DEC buttons on the front and rear separately, but added the capability to format the SDCard, add catalogs, and delete catalogs, upload firmware all from the hand controller. He also streamlined the upload process to make it faster. Unfortunately, this much change usually comes with a few bugs, that also have found and squashed. That's where the beta testers come in. We really all hate to have to tell Ren??? that something is not right. Every time that happens, something gets pushed back.
The Gemini 2 system is both more complex in the software aspect, but in many ways has less hardware to fail. The G1 had specially chips (5 of them) to drive the servos. The G2 only has three. Basically everything is handled by two ARM based processors, one it the main unit and one it the Hand controller. The servo movement and it's feed back in the G1 was handled by separate processors. This is not the case in the G2. The ARM in the main unit has to handle everything.:
RS-232 ports, USB ports, Ethernet Port and Web interface, Servo driving and feedback, Autoguider, Classic Hand controller, Feature port , Encoder port and of course all the modeling, PEC and interface to the Graphics processor. I think our maker every night for Ren???.
Tom Hilton
