wmlavender

This is a route that I was planning to take on Linux, so it is disappointing to hear that this was your experience. Is it possible that HDHomeRun as the backend to Tvheadend is the way to go?

Emulators can take you quite far, though you need to research some of them on the net to figure out working combinations of OS versions and emulator versions. Here are examples of things that I have managed to get to work at some point in time. Some for real software development and some for amusement.

KVM (x86 and x86_64): Linux, BSD, OSX, Hurd, Haiku, MSDOS, Minix, QNX, RTEMS, Xenix, Solaris, UnixWare, Windows 95 through 11.

QEMU (for non-x86): AIX 4, Linux (m68k, arm, sparc, powerpc, mips, riscv), OSX (ppc), Solaris 8 (sparc), SunOS 4.1.4 (sparc), Windows NT 4 (mips)

SIMH (for old DEC computers): NetBSD, VMS, Ultrix, RSX-11M, RT-11

Some of them can be quite finicky to get to work. Xenix was especially hard.

Solaris 11 is quite easy to get running in QEMU/KVM though. You can download the media from Oracle.

The only real hardware I routinely run has either Debian Linux, macOS, or Raspberry Pi.

I thought that the joke in Alaska was that mosquitoes are the state bird.

Lots of large observatories use EPICS. Like Gemini, Keck, Kitt Peak, LIGO, etc.

There is also Electronics Plus in San Rafael. It is an old school electronics parts store, complete with the ability to sell you cable by the foot.

Many Bluegrass websites are labors of love created by musicians that are not experts in computing and web design. If you were to tell them that they are violating the ISO 8601 time standard, they would have no idea of what ISO 8601 was. Just be glad that they are adding more Bluegrass to the web.

Mind you, there are high quality Bluegrass websites around. For example, take a look at the California Bluegrass Association website.

https://californiabluegrass.org/

Or the IBMA website.

https://ibma.org/

If I can find a 5 volt compatible device that does what we need, then why would I even bother looking at 3.3 volt devices?

It sounds like you are suggesting that we build our own custom circuit boards. The people that I work for do not manufacture our own circuit boards. We largely do not have the expertise to manufacture our own circuit boards. We are not electrical engineers.

The Advanced Photon Source has electrical engineers, but we are not part of the Advanced Photon Source. If we go to the Advanced Photon Source and ask them to build boards for us, they would probably quote a price and ask us if we have the budget to pay for that. Or they might say that they are too busy to do it for us. That would be especially likely now since the Advanced Photon Source is in the middle of a major upgrade.

In the end, it is better for us to find vendors that make data acquisition equipment compatible with 5 volt logic and buy stuff from them. That is probably true for most of the organizations that make use of the Advanced Photon Source.

No doubt. But lots of Arduinos have been used in scientific experiments because they are inexpensive and easy to work with. So the choices made in Arduino-like boards do affect us.

Not if you are doing it for 10,000 signals or more.

I work for several beamlines at the Advanced Photon Source. There are probably far, far over 1,000,000 electronic signals at the whole APS facility that use 5 volt signaling. So almost any level shifting will be to embed 3.3 volt signals in a 5 volt world. It is simpler to buy equipment that has already done this.

Yes, most scientific lab tools have some way of communicating with third-party tools. We tend to shun tools that do not, although some vendors are perplexed and/or annoyed by this. No one vendor carries everything you need.

There have been several generations of scientific instrumentation standards used for connecting products from various companies together.

Some take the form of Crates, which can contain individual modules that you plug into the crates. For example,

  *NIM* - <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Instrumentation_Module> - Started in the 1960s, but there is a ton of these modules still in use.  Lots pictures of NIM electronics can be found by doing a Google Image search for *nim electronics*.

  *CAMAC* -<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Automated_Measurement_and_Control> - Started in the 1970s, but is mostly obsolete and removed now.  It was the first bus standard to provide for computer control of instrumentation, mostly by PDP-11s and then later VAXes.  It could send you 24-bit data words at the blindingly fast speed of 1 MHz.  Some pictures of them can be found by a Google Image search for "*camac electronics*.

  *VME* - <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VMEbus> - Originally created in the 1980s as a computer bus for m68k computers.  But it found a new, far faster life as a scientific instrumentation standard.  A number of bus standards like VXI have attempted to claim the throne of VME, but VME is still widely in use.  Some pictures of this can be found by a Google Search for "vme beamline electronics*.

The other major form factor is cables

  *RS232-RS485-etc* - <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-232> - An ancient standard started in 1960, but still widely in use.

  *GPIB or IEEE488* - <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE-488> - Originally created by Hewlett Packard, but still widely in use.  Seems to be on the decline these days.

  *USB* - <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB> - The new contender for the throne.  Its use is growing by leaps and bounds with each passing year.  Bear in mind that one of the largest uses here of USB is for USB-to-Serial dongles that let us plug in the RS232 and RS485 stuff we are still using.

  *Ethernet* - <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet> - Using mostly TCP and UDP, but not always.  This is the other contender for the throne.

  *Short-lived standards* - There were a variety of other standards that had short periods on the stage, like parallel ports, Firewire, SCSI, proprietary bare ribbon cables, etc.  Most of this has gone away, except for the proprietary ribbon cables *(sigh)*.

I do most of my work these days for two organizations, namely MRCAT <http://mrcat.iit.edu/> and BioCAT <https://www.bio.aps.anl.gov/> which both make use of X-ray beams at the Advanced Photon Source <https://www.aps.anl.gov/About/Overview>. The APS is a 1.1 kilometer electron storage ring, which produces high intensity X-ray beams at 70 sectors around the ring. My employers use 3 beamlines at 2 of those sectors for materials research and for biophysics.

You can find a lot of beamline pictures by doing a Google search for advanced photon source beamlines.

There are many of us that work with scientific instrumentation that has to retain compatibility with 5 volt logic levels. Many labs have equipment that is over 50 years old and which is still in use. Suppose you tell a scientist that they have to replace a working instrument built in the 1960s with a new one that costs over $250,000 only because it does not use 3.3 volt logic levels. They are going to laugh at you and say that they want to keep using the old instrument.

So having cheap and easily available electronics that can still interface with 5 volts can be very useful to some of us.

If L1 is a problem, then L2 would be a problem as well. After all, at L2 the spacecraft is receiving its commands from the direction of the sun.

However, the problem is not quite as bad as it seems. Spacecraft at L1 and L2 Lagrange points actually are in a halo orbit that "orbits" around the Lagrange point. Attempting to stay at exactly the L1 or L2 point is unstable, since gravitational forces tend to knock you away from that point. The halo orbits are much more stable. And for a spacecraft in a halo orbit, you never have to point your antenna directly at the sun.

The problem is solvable for radio communication at least. There are currently 4 spacecraft orbiting the Earth-Sun L1 point (ACE, DSCOVR, SOHO, and WIND) as well as 3 spacecraft at the L2 point (Gaia, James Webb, and Spektr-RG).

Is this likely to work at Lunar distances anytime soon? I saw that the James Webb telescope people were unhappy about losing much of their communication time on the Deep Space Network to the Artemis 1 mission. Could this be more cost effective than an major upgrade to the Deep Space Network?

How about at Earth-Sun L1 and L2 distances?