Hi Bob,
I've had two experiences with having things built for AMSAT. In one case, I was very disappointed with the parts placement precision. I'd like to think that was just the result of a poor choice of vendors. In both cases I found the amount of solder on most joints to be less than I would want to fly so I added solder to every joint. But having the parts already in place saved me a *lot* of time.
Chuck
Robert McGwier wrote:
While I would have preferred a different route for this discussion to have been joined, it is timely. I have suggested that we do not have the right computer for our new possible mission. We are pushing on the new opportunity with all our might. It does not make sense in any way to fly the IHU-3 with IPS on it since there is no reason whatsoever to have real time control of the possible new mission package. We need the simplest kind of computer that we believe will control the packages, conduct communications with contro, and last for 15 years.
That said, there is nothing that changes in our need for the IHU-3. We are committed to bringing them to the table for P3E and should we fly a satellite, stand alone, it is likely to be needed there. I am going to arrange to have the IHU-3's built incorporating the changes/mods we have learned about from others. Lyle and I have discussed this and I have promised him I would have them built.
For the future:
I am actually even suggesting that we are near the end of life on our ability to build these kinds of devices in our basements/shops and get them reliable enough with a high enough yield to be useful. I am suggesting that if a cool head takes a long hard look at where we are, where the parts are, and what resources we have, that we are likely to decide we are better off having our people do the designs and then having the boards manufactured for us. The price has fallen so far on set up charge and building that this probably makes sense. I am not mandating this, I am suggesting that we should investigate this.
I have suggested that if we fly our own core in a fully qualified rad hard FPGA, there are OPEN CORES for processors. We can easily modify these cores to have fully EDAC registers and memory on chip for cache and off chip memory can be the slow EDAC we know about. In other words, time has marched on, and there is no reason we should not investigate whether we should not move on as well. These cores are available TODAY in the opencores.org group. We should look.
Bob
Rick Hambly (W2GPS) wrote:
Lyle,
Thank you. You are exactly correct.
Rick W2GPS AMSAT LM2232