coneblog

So I’m on the way to the first Skycam integration test, and my code isn’t ready. I’m queasy and ready to barf. I will be the guy who let down the team.

I arrived at the demo site – Haverford High School – amid a good bit of bustle. Guys were unloading gear, coffee was brewing, Garrett was chatting up various team members. I unloaded my stuff and slunk into the classroom we were using as a base. Richard, my good buddy at AA&Co who got me into this project, must have noticed my state. He set me up on a table in the corner, and got me calmed down.

Ellen, Garrett’s wife and sometime Skycam project manager, gave me a cup of the strongest blackest coffee I have ever tasted. I felt the buzz come on, and I set to work coding. My only hope was that the hardware guys (control panel, controllers, winches, etc) would be as unready as I felt.

I was in luck. The hardware boys had a basic motor control panel, but it was not yet tuned to the ¼ hp winch motor. I was able to get by with a demo of the control panel and the fishing weights. Hardware had saved Software. Not for the last time.

About three weeks later we reconvened, and I was ready. I demoed using the keyboard as control panel, and I was able to run my full control loop at a sparkling three cycles per second. Not bad on a Z80. I was coding in FORTH, which has a Treaded Interpreted Langguage structure (elegant!). It is an OS and development environment in one. A TIL puts you right down on the “bare metal”, just this much up from assembler. A good thing, too, as I would need every tick of that one megahertz processor before the Skycam would fly.