So there were a pile of pictures of the DAS (Data Acquisition System) and BLASTbus electronics on my personal camera that I’ve finally gotten around to uploading. There are a lot more than these few I’ve posted, but others probably don’t find them as interesting as I do. I’m biased because I’ve been working on this for most of the past year.<\/p>\n
These revamped BLASTbus electronics (BBus2, if you will) are in a wide variety of ways better than the old ones. The architecture is modular with a motherboard handling processing and BLASTbus communication, and a variety of daughter cards for all your digital or analog input\/output needs. There are four varieties of daughter card so far. I’m especially attached to the digital daughter card because I had a much larger hand in making it (it is mostly the work of myself and Ian Hincks, an undergraduate that worked with me last summer).<\/p>\n
I’m similarly attached to a new DAC system I\/Ian\/Barth developed. The digital daughter card uses a 5-bit address and 3 serial lines to talk to either 5 or 32 DACs depending how fancy one wants to be. BLAST doesn’t want to be fancy, so it just uses 5. RS-485 transmitters are used to make sure the digital signal doesn’t get corrupted over long wires.<\/p>\n\n\t\t