We are looking for someone to design a microcontroller for our Naval Academy 40 foot dish.

The controller will be a small rack mount box with serial input port suitible for taking AZ/EL commands from any of the popular Tracking Programs. The output is an analog voltage from +/- 10 volts to drive the 75 HP hydraulic system as a closed loop PID controller. There are a few other discrete TTL signals involved to get the hydraulics running and to handshake with the various interlocks. The device will have front panel LCD readouts and buttons. See the web page where I am assembling ideas:

http://www.ew.usna.edu/~bruninga/12m-dish.html

There will be two such boxes. One at the dish and the other almost a mile away at the control station. One is the controller and the other is just a remote display. They are connected by a serial port operating at 9600 baud with the remote one also connected to whatever tracking program is controlling...

This dish is an X/Y dish and not AZ/EL (X goes East and West, and Y goes North and South), but a few trig conversions can easily manipulate between the two. The optical shaft encoders are 16 bit+ and operate at 9600 baud serial also but at RS422 levels.

We have been using the one I built 10 years ago that I programmed in Qbasic and runs on a PC104 bus DOS card. All of the TTL level interfaces are there... But I just don't have the time or patience any more to do this again...

So we are going to contract it out. This will be a full blown Government procurement with all the overhead and other baggage. So only serious respondents should consider this. We have not yet written a formal spec, or procurment package. But this is just a heads up that we will be putting this together soon, since this must be completed this summer.

Nothing in this email or web page in any way obligates the government to proceed with this project. It is just a way of getting out the word that we are looking for a solution to replacing our aging controller.

Bob Bruninga US Naval Academy Satellite Lab