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Intel AnyPoint Network
When I built the observatory, I had a phone line, a coaxial
cable, and a power line extended from the house to the
observatory. If I had more foresight, I would have also run
computer network cabling to the observatory. Then it would have
been possible to network my in-house computer to the
observatory’s computer, or I could have directly controlled the
telescope and CCD camera from my in-house computer. The computer
in the house is located in my astronomy office, a spare bedroom
that has a computer, desk, shelves, and other assorted
materials, including all past issues of ASTRONOMY magazine, Sky
& Telescope issues back to January 1955, and National Geographic
issues back to 1956 as well as other assorted white elephants.
The computer is a reasonably powerful system with a 450mHz chip
and 256 megabytes of RAM. It currently runs under Windows 98
second edition and is linked to a 256K DSL line for fast
Internet connection. I wanted to link the in-house computer with
the observatory computer, but I did not want to run 220+ feet of
network cable across my front yard. It would have been an
enormous task to run it from the house through multiple cactus
patches to the observatory not to mention having to bury the
cable to protect it from the elements and preserve the
appearance of my front yard.
Fortunately, I happened to see an advertisement in Time magazine
for Intel’s
AnyPoint Home Network. This product networks two or more
computers that are connected to the same telephone line. It
comes in a variety of configurations, including parallel port
and USB models as well as internal PCI cards. I originally
purchased two PCI cards, one for the in-house computer and one
for the observatory computer. The total cost was about $160, and
the system had a nominal network speed of 1 megabit per second
(1 Mbps). I had no trouble installing the cards and the
accompanying software on both computers. Amazingly, the two
computers were networked together with no problem. I could now
transfer files between the computers, and I no longer had to use
Zip or Jaz disks to move data between the computers.
The Intel software allows you to map the drives and printers on
every computer on the network to permit or deny network access
to these drives and printers. I calculated it took about 5-7
seconds to move a 512K CCD image file from the observatory
computer to the in-house computer. Today, there are several
similar or less expensive phone network systems and “wireless”
network systems available. The wireless networks use radio
transmission or infrared transmission between computers to move
data over the network. |
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