Work-In-Progress Reports for September 2009

KryoFlux - Hardware Issues: One thing we'd like to mention regarding the USB reliability: The official forum for these boards list many issues, and only from people who try max out the bandwidth on their boards. We can certainly imagine that there is no (visible!) problem with the hardware/firmware with normal use. (more)

KryoFlux - Research: We need to verify whether the board used is capable of continuous USB communication for an extended period of time, that is the first bottleneck. (more)

KryoFlux - Continue With Current Hardware: The resolution of disk reading is about the same as a Trace machine, it's 41ns per cell/precompensation vs. 50ns on trace with 25ns precompensation. The problem is the combination of slow CPU, slow USB, and lack of RAM. Ideally we could read to RAM and then do a transfer, but we don't have enough RAM... so we may have to communicate with the PC and compress data while it's being read. (more)