[Coco] Data Gatherer

[Dennis Bathory-Kitsz]

At 08:09 AM 6/30/04 -0500, smostrom at mn.rr.com wrote:
>was your Data Gatherer system in the mid-80's a 
>result of one of your hardware articles, or was it 
>something you needed for yourself and decided 
>to market?  How did it work?  How successful was 
>it as far as sales?  It looks as if it was a stand-alone
>computer, but worked with a Coco?

It was something I wanted to build for interactive musical purposes, and
didn't have the chance to do so until a company came to us to design a
power regulation and monitoring interface that used the CoCo as a central
device. Their system included a CoCo, 5-inch color monitor, thermal
printer, Data Gatherer, input isolation boards, and bunches of shielding..

The DG was an A/D D/A board, 12 bits, using successive approximation in
machine language for the A/D conversion. There was a realtime clock as well.

We sold it for about $300 (as I recall ... been a while), and they bought
perhaps 30 completed units. I wrote up the article for UnderColor in
multiple parts, and offered the Data Gatherer kits through Green Mountain
Micro. We might have sold one or two.

It wasn't a standalone computer. It was set up like a ROM pack, with the
DGOS taking over and configuring the CoCo system at boot. I later included
a battery backup system for data. Not sure if it made it to the final
design, or was an add-on.

I believe I still have about a dozen boards, but no parts -- and the D/A
converter is probably hard to find.

Dennis

PS to all: I'm just back. Now I have to replace the water heater, whose
tank split the day before I left... sigh.