Software Support for a Video-Digital Data Acquisition System

This manual describes the program called SCAN which provides software control for a Digital-Video Data Acquisition System. SCAN is a selfcontained real-time program based on the basic instruction set provided by Data General Corporation for the Nova-Line Computers. It was custom tailored to fit into a skeleton environment, doing its own storage, interrupt and INPUT OUTPUT management, thereby releasing much of the core for data storage purposes. It uses none of the manufacturers standard software, which would claim priority over parts of the core, and was built to be adaptable for a variety of acquisition modes. SCAN supports a configuration consisting of a Wang tape drive, an ASR-33 teletype equipped with a paper tape reader and punch, an EMR optical data acquisition unit and a PEP storage unit. Special attention was paid to the subject of user communication minimizing the need for a detailed understanding of the internal workings of the program.