[Coco] moving files on bootup >> leading to that CNC Coco machine

[Gene Heskett]

On Sunday 03 February 2008, John Donaldson wrote:
>Back in th late 70's I ws working at the Johnson Space Center in
>Houston, Texas. I ws in the Medical Research Division and a member of
>the Appolo, Skylab, ASTP/Shuttle Pre-Flight nd Recovery Team. One of the
>problems we had was obtaining a accurate heartrate on our test subjects.
>We decided that the most accurate way was to measure the timing between
>heart beats. Up till this time all automated heartrate monitors used an
>averging scheme. That is they counted heartbeats for a 60 sec period
>then displayed the heartbeat. Some supplier had sent me a 8085 eval
>board which had a monitor prom on it. It only had 1K of ram memory, but
>sockets for three more 256 byte Eproms for a total of 1K of Eprom. It
>would hook to a KSR33 for a user interface. I decided to see if this
>littl computer could measure the timing between input pulses from it's
>I/O chip. So I hooked a pulse generater to one of the I/O pins, wrote a
>program that made this I/O pin an Input, then sat in loop waiting for
>the input to go High. When it went High, I then would take the contents
>of a 8 bit regester and calcuate heatrate. Then I took this and sent it
>to a 8 bit I/O port which connected to a 8 bit D/A. The output of the
>D/A went to a strip chart. I then cleared the counting register, added
>to it a pre-determine count, then stated incrementing the regester.
>After each increment, I looked to see if the input I/O pin had gone High
>again. If so then repeat all of the steps. The pre-load of the register
>was to compensate for the processing time. After some tweaking it work
>rather well. One thing I found was it was so fast that I had to put a
>NOP loop in between increaments. I then worked on a input circuit that
>would take a real heatbeat and strip everything off except for the main
>R-Wave and then convert this into a Pulse with a fixed with. The timing
>of this fixed pulse was the value of the preload. It all worked fine
>except in real life a person's heatbeat does not stay the same from
>moment to moment and if you stress a person their heatbeat can increase
>very rapidly. I found that the NOP loop being fixed was causing me
>problems. So I had to change that code to be flexible. That is long if
>the heatbeat was low and short if the heatbeat was high. when I got it
>all working, it not only measured accurating the beta-to-beat heatrate,
>was accurate +-1 heartbeat from as low as 20 BPM to 3000 BPM. Since I
>was measuring heatrate beat-to-beat, if a subject had a PAC or PVA beat,
>that is an iregular heatbeat, it would show up on the strip chart
>looking like a S. This was because it would first look like a real high
>heartrate followed by a real low heatrate, then back to the normal
>heatrate.. I then added code that looked at other I/O pins connected to
>push buttons. This code would put either all zeros or all Ones to the
>I/O port that was connected to the D/A, so it could be calibrated to a
>strip chart. I put all my code into a eprom and only used the 1K of ram
>for strachpat and temp storage of data. I ended up getting a New
>Technology Award from NASA, a $500 cash bonus, wrote up in the NASA Tech
>Brief Magizine, and a joint patent between NASA, my company, and myself.
>I still have my copy ( a little yellow now LOL) of the manual I had to
>write and the certificate presented to me from NASA. I even got an telex
>from a reseacher that wanted to know if my system would measure
>hummingbird heatrates. I wrote back saying if their heatrate was below
>3000 BPM, then yes, He wrote back saying at rest they are 200 BPM and
>flying as high as 600 BPM. I sent him a copy of the manual. The manual
>contained everything you needed to re-create my system, include all
>circuit diagrams, and source code. BTW, I had no assembler, so I hand
>assembed all of the code. For doucmentation, I also had to hand calcuate
>all timing loops, all code loops, and etc. Since all of my code fit in a
>256 byte Eprom, it was not be bad of a job.

Certainly a good job, John, thanks for sharing.  Re the patent, did anyone 
ever get any royalties from its use?

-- 
Cheers, Gene
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