Engineering Design Team, Inc.
2018/2/28: EDT has released version 5.5.5.1 software / driver packages for all VisionLink, PDV and PCD series general-and special-purpose I/O boards. The new packages include support for Windows 10 Version 1709 and Linux kernels through 4.15, Linux MSI interrupt support for boards running firmware that supports MSI interrupts, and other improvements.
For a complete list of changes, click the appropriate Changelog link in one of the following pages.
2017/12/13: The city of Hillsboro, OR has changed the name of the street where EDT is located. As of October 17th, 2017, our physical address is:
3423 NE John Olsen Avenue
Hillsboro, OR 97124 USA
The city of Hillsboro will still deliver mail to our previous address of 3423 NW John Olsen Place, but please make a note of our new street address and update your records.
Simulation of merging black holes radiating gravitational waves (source: LIGO, via Wikimedia).
2017/10/03: EDT congratulates the winners of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics, Barry Barish and Kip Thorne (CalTech) and Ranier Weiss (MIT), for their work at Caltech’s Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) using EDT products. Their groundbreaking research and related Nobel Prize win have been followed by virtually every mainstream and science-related news outlet around the world.
Gravitational waves, predicted by Einstein 100 years ago, are cosmic ripples which distort space-time. LIGO uses EDT frame grabbers and fiber extenders / converters (as described in a 2015 paper) to detect these waves. LIGO’s Hartmann Sensor Control System incorporates a 1-megapixel CCD camera outputting 11-bit data at 60 Hz. The resulting 120 MBytes/sec data stream is transferred over the 100-meter distance via an EDT RCX Camera Link fiber-optic extension system, and into the memory of the receiving Linux computer via an EDT PCI Express Camera Link frame grabber.
EDT is excited and honored to have a part in this breakthrough research. For details, explore the links below.
EDT VISION PRODUCTS
Frame grabbers: https://edt.com/product-lines/camera-link-frame-grabbers/
Extenders: https://edt.com/product-lines/camera-link-extenders/
ORIGINAL LIGO-RELEASED INFORMATION
Press release (webpage): https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/news/ligo20160211
Press release (PDF): https://www.ligo.org/news/detection-press-release.pdf
Press conference (video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEPIwEJmZyE
Paper: https://dcc.ligo.org/public/0010/T1000155/015/T1000155-v15.pdf
UPDATES FROM SCIENCE-FOCUSED NEWS OUTLETS*
Nature: https://www.nature.com/news/gravitational-wave-detection-wins-physics-nobel-1.22737/
Science: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/10/ripples-space-us-trio-wins-physics-nobel-discovery-gravitational-waves/
Science Alert: https://www.sciencealert.com/nobel-prize-physics-2017-news-gravitational-waves-ligo-weiss-barish-thorne/
Scientific American: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nobel-physics-prize-goes-to-gravitational-wave-scientists/
Space: https://www.space.com/38355-gravitational-waves-nobel-prize-future-astronomy.html/
UPDATES FROM MAINSTREAM NEWS OUTLETS*
BBC: http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-41476648/
New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/03/science/nobel-prize-physics.html/
Los Angeles Times: http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-nobel-ligo-caltech-20171003-story.html/
* These links are just a tiny sampling of the extensive coverage of this Nobel-recognized research by major news outlets worldwide. More coverage is readily available from multiple independent news sources.
2017/03/03: Dr. Stuart Jefferies of Georgia State University (GSU) recently led a multi-institutional project to open Antarctica’s new solar observatory, where EDT’s VisionLink-series products connect the above-ground telescope cameras to an underground lab for image capture.
The South Pole Solar Observatory, located near the U.S. Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, uses EDT VisionLink XF fiber-optic extenders to connect above-ground Camera Link cameras (Teledyne-Dalsa Falcon 2, 76 MHz, 80-bit) on the telescopes to EDT VisionLink F4 frame grabbers in an underground lab.
With the demanding Antarctic environment and need for uninterrupted acquisition throughout the two-month duration of the project, EDT delivered.
“All of our EDT equipment worked flawlessly,” reported Bill Giebink, an engineer with the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii.
In early 2017 a team led by Dr. Stuart Jefferies, a professor in GSU’s Department of Physics and Astronomy, completed a project to open the South Pole Solar Observatory for recording high-resolution solar images.
In an online article, GSU reports that the project is designed to log solar images every five seconds, and that the goals are to “measure and characterize internal gravity waves omnipresent in the Sun’s atmosphere, identify the role of these waves in transporting energy and momentum, and use the properties of these waves to provide a mapping of the structure and dynamics of the Sun’s atmosphere.”
Other uses for the data, the article adds, include “studying the triggers of space weather events (solar flares and coronal mass ejections) that have direct societal impact, mapping of the Sun’s sub-surface structure and dynamics, and investigating the solar coronal heating enigma, a long-standing puzzle of why the temperature of the Sun’s atmosphere rises from about 6,000 degrees at its visible surface (the photosphere) to a few million degrees in its outer atmosphere (the corona).”
The completed installation project, sponsored by the National Science Foundation’s Division of Polar Programs, consisted of scientists from Georgia State, the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the University of Rome Tor Vergata, the University of Hawaii, and the European Space Agency.
Photo and source information (used with permission) are drawn from the Georgia State University article at: https://m.phys.org/news/2016-11-georgia-state-south-pole-solar.html