The Northern Lights are currently off, pending installation of permanent electrical power and fixing other code-compliance issues. We don't yet when this work will be completed. (There are also some technical problems with the control system itself, but those problems will not be addressed until the installation is completed.)

For best viewing of the Northern Lights installation and testing, download an RTSP-compatible client (e.g., VLC at http://www.videolan.org) and connect to rtsp:spare1-29.cs.purdue.edu/mpeg4/media.amp. ====== Collected (but Rough) Documentation ====== From Mike Miller, 3/3/08… ===== Block Diagram ===== ===== Wiring Diagram ===== ====== Expedient for Testing/Running the Northern Lights====== Northern Lights information from Zach Tatlock, 1/12/08… I'm attaching a hacked way to drive the boards from the current new NL. It is ugly, but uses the same mechanism as the old NL, so will work modulo changes that Mike has made to hardware. As I left things, all you should need to do (to run to old development board) is attach the parallel port to a PC and then: $ cd hack_nl/ $ vim Main.java # change the size of Pat.SIZE to the # of transformers $ make $ ./gen_c_driver trial.nl $ sudo ./C_DRIVER/drive Note that you might have to find the correct “io.h” to include (in C_DRIVER/HEADER). On my Ubuntu system, it's “sys/io.h”. On my old Slackware box it's “asm/io.h”.