Changeset 116 in t29-www for en


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Timestamp:
Oct 6, 2009, 2:27:43 AM (14 years ago)
Author:
sven
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Entwicklungsprojekte

  • en/development-projects.shtm: Initialuebersetzung
  • de/development-projects.shtm: Fehler und Design korrigiert

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  • en/development-projects.shtm

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    2323<div id="content">
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    2524
    26     <p>
    27        <i>This page is about to be translated. Please see again later.</i>
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    2926
     27<p>This page lists some of our development projects where old hardware meets modern
     28computer equipment. All projects are selfmade, with partly enormous hardware and
     29software efforts, like routed PCBs, kernel drivers and microcontrollers.
     30<br/>Upcoming projects:</p>
     31<ul>
     32  <li>punch card I/O with AVR ATmega microcontrollers via RS232 to computers,
     33      Qt platform independent processing, with various hardware</li>
     34  <li>Analex printer interface to the Bull Gamma 10 computer (uC based)</li>
     35</ul>
     36<br/>
     37
     38<h3>Paper tape processing with contemporary computers</h3>
     39
     40<p>We were often in a situation when some data stored on a punched paper needed
     41to be sent on long distances. Having Internet access and e-mail, that's no matter
     42for todays computers, once you can read in paper tapes. The other way around,
     43punching new or modified data on punched papers is a frequent need in our daily
     44business. <br/>Therefore we've initiated the <b>Paper Tape Project</b> with the
     45pronounced goal to handle paper tapes with contemporary computers, that is, to
     46read, change and write (punch) them.</p>
     47<p>We used comparatively new punched paper devices that already feature a Centronics
     48interface at TTL level. Unfortunately the devices (in details: reader
     49Ghilmetti FER 201, puncher FACIT 4070) aren't yet implementing the Centronics
     50common standard from the 1970s (officially standardized as IEEE-1284 not until 1994),
     51therefore connecting those devices with a simple parallel port printer cable
     52won't do the job.</p>
     53
     54<div class="desc-left">
     55   <img src="/shared/photos/rechnertechnik/fer201.jpg" width="239" height="148" alt="Photography of the paper tape reader Ghilmetti FER 201" />
     56   <p class="bildtext" style="width:239px;"><b>Ghilmetti FER 201</b> reader with framework for reading zig-zag tapes</p>
     57</div>
     58
     59<p>The very first step was to read the manual carefully to assemble a specially wired
     60cable to connect the punch card device with the parallel port of a PC (commonly known as
     61"LPT port", a standard port on PC motherboards just a few years ago). Since the devices
     62don't implement the standarized hand shake, the second step was to implement a suitable
     63driver to emulate the right communication behaviour for the punch card devices.</p>
     64
     65<p>Development started on the free GNU/Linux Operating System where we used the ppdev
     66framework of the Linux 2.6 kernel series to program a user space driver in the programming
     67language C with a little effort compared to a real kernel space driver.</p>
     68
     69<p>The parallel port consists of three 8-bit hardware registers: a bidirectional data
     70register, a control register and a signal register. Since paper tapes are made of
     718-bit words (octetts), we just connected these eight bits on the data register to save
     72them directly to one byte in the computer. Using the control and signal pins, we could
     73implement a interrupt (device cycle) driven communication, since the status register
     74features one interrupt enabled bit (strobe). Our devices punch at 80 chars/sec and read in
     75250 chars/sec, so even older PCs can easily run the driver programs.</p>
     76
     77<div class="desc-right">
     78   <img src="/shared/photos/rechnertechnik/facit4070.jpg" width="144" height="196" alt="Photography of the paper tape puncher FACIT 4070" />
     79   <p class="bildtext" style="width:145px;">The legendary puncher <b>FACIT 4070</b></p>
     80</div>
     81
     82<p>As already told, there's not really the question how to model punched papers on
     83computers, since they use the same word length (8 bit) and computer files are
     84conceptually the same as paper tapes: byte arrays. A 250 byte binary file therefore
     85represents a 250 chars long punched paper. Thus processing punch card files
     86with Unix command line tools or hex editors is very easy. To speed up the workflow,
     87we wrote some simple perl scripts to label paper tapes. Afterwards we wrote a
     88graphical editor, called "Paper Tape Editor", where binary files could be visualized
     89and directly edited as paper tapes on the screen. This program was written in C, using
     90the Gtk+ toolkit. After writing drivers for the Microsoft Windows Operating System,
     91this program was extended to the "Paper Tape Suite" to read, edit, save and punch
     92paper tapes graphically. That way every possible procedures with paper tapes can be
     93performed with ordinary PCs.</p>
     94
     95<p>You can get further details with a lot of documentation material on the homepage of
     96<a class="go" href="http://dev.technikum29.de/projekte/paper-tape-project/documentation/"
     97>The Paper Tape Project</a>. The source code was released as open source can be checked
     98out from the <a
     99href="http://dev.technikum29.de/svn/listing.php?repname=paper-tape-project">technikum29.de  subversion repository</a>.</p>
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