Re: Re: Mazatrol

Ron wrote to doug:
A friend of mine owns an AcuRite Mill Power. A couple months ago his
hard drive failed. AcuRite told him to just buy a drive at the local
computer store, the smallest he could find and plug it in. The mother
board was a common 486 board, the drive was a common ide drive.
Booting the distribution floppy reloaded all that was needed to the
drive. Note this one uses standard PC hardware, but runs its own
software- probably DOS under it.
However, the system has a couple I/O cards for the glass scales and
some kind of DSP for the servos. I dont recall now, but I did
recognize the brand name on the DSP card.

As we have been saying here- use custom hardware to do the hard parts.
ron

Ron,

OR a second CHEAP PC. (treat IT like custom hardware)

Ballendo

P.S. I don't want a war here, just the understanding that there is
more than one way to skin the cat. And I do understand that some ways
ARE BETTER (i'm talkin' the hardware being better, here) for SOME
PEOPLE, and in SOME situations.