Engineers at Miltope Corp. in Hope Hull, Ala., needed a small rugged computer for central processing functions of the U.S. Army`s Soldier Portable On-system Repair Too1 (SPORT).
The Pentium-based PC/104 Little Board/P5I from Ampro Computers in San Jose, Calif., met their needs.
"One of the P5I`s biggest pluses was its compact size and day-to-day PC functionality," says Jeff Palombo, SPORT program manager at Miltope.
Miltope`s PCU-5100, the SPORT unit, is a portable maintenance and diagnostics computer unit, that works on the intrusive design of various weapons systems to repair possible errors while in the field, Palombo says.
The Ampro device is 100/166 MHz Pentium processor with PC/AT compatible system on a single board, and as much as 128 megabytes of onboard DRAM. It uses a PCI Super VGA liquid crystal display or CRT local bus controller with GUI accelerator and a high speed Ethernet LAN interface.
Standard features of the unit include a fixed, high-capacity 2.5-inch hard disk drive, four Type II or two Type III PC card slots, an internal CD-ROM drive with positive locking spindle, and an alphanumeric key pad with integral pointing device in close proximity to the display. The unit comes standard with 16 megabytes of RAM and is upgradeable to 128 megabytes of RAM.
It operates in e temperature range of -25 degrees Celsius to 50 C and meets the requirements of MIL-STD-461. - J.M.
For more information on the Little Board/P5I and Ampro Computers contact Desiree Chamlis by phone at 408-360-4354, by fax 408-360-0222, by post at Ampro Computers, Inc., 4757 Hellyer Ave., San Jose, Calif., 95138, by e-mail at [email protected], or on the World Wide Web at http://www.ampro.com.
The superconducting analog-to-digital converter (ADC) chip from TRW in Redondo Beach, Calif., is be ing used by NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineers in Pasadena, Calif., to run an infrared imaging system.
