May 24, 2019

Grinder -- who is responsible?

Responsible, in terms of who made significant contribution, not in the sense "who to blame". Much of this work was done in the period roughly from 1985 to 1990. It is remarkable that this system still runs reliably today.

The fact that this system has made a large number of successful large telescope mirrors, this system can only be viewed as a fine success. The following is a list of people I am aware of and their roles in the project as far as I understand it.

Skip Schaller -- He wrote the bulk of the software and directed what he did not do himself.

John Hill -- He laid out the design philosophy and collaborated with Skip on the overall design of the system -- and never hesitated to get his hands dirty and write CL scripts.

Dave Harvey -- He was involved with programming the Z80 based power panel controllers, as well as writing the "dculib" portion of the VxWorks software.

Alan Koski -- He wrote odisp and ograph, which are part of the mirror package.

Tom Trebisky -- He wrote several VxWorks drivers and the code for the 8751 rotation control computer. He is now involved in migrating the software from the sun/sparc systems to x86 linux systems.

There were a host of electrical engineers that designed electronics, as well as technicians who built boards and wired the oven. Larry Wilson, Vince Moreno, and many others. I don't know all these well as I have primarily been involved with the software.


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Tom's home page / tom@mmto.org