Mars 2053 [Spirit rover sends back data stating that it is in the year 2053!]

Astrobiology Magazine ^ | 1.26.04 | Astrobiology Magazine

[Jonah Hex]

"It wasn't me either, Timelord."

[SavageRepublican]

Let's hope The Master didn't get hold of it! That could be REAL trouble!!!

[_Jim]

I did a lot of realtime Z80-based stuff a few years back - primary tools were an HP Logic State Analyzer, O-scope and a pulse gen (to stretch the 10 ns pulse output by the HP LSA) plus an in-circuit ROM/EPROM emulator (code was down loaded into and ran from this box) plus the usual collection of editors and assemblers (this was in Z80 assembly lang.) -

- the code had to do real-time tracking and sampling on an 3600 Baud signal. Bascially the software performed the function of a 'phased lock loop' (to track the data phase), locate an 8-bit sync sequence, re-assemble the 76 bit 'data' into respective 10 bit 'command', 16-bit 'address' plus the Rate 1/2 Convolutinal Code EDAC bits plus a 10 bit Parity calculation - I got it all show-horned into less than 8 Kbytes and running at 4 MHz including the operator interface (simple keyboard scan and debounce and multi-line LCD output) *plus* a serial data stream created in software for control of an accompanying receiver!

It taught me a lot about task scheduling, interrupt coding, scheduling of processor intensive data-decoding tasks in 'background' subordinate to the interrupt driven real-time events of tracking that 3.6 KBaud incoming signal ...

[RckyRaCoCo]

"are you responsible for my shifting in time?"