Fri., Feb. 3rd

PADS install didn't have enough space.  Need to free up some disk space and try again.  Maybe delete the ZIP file?  It is 1.5 GB.  Wow, have over 5 GB of stuff in the Recycle Bin.  Empty that.  Then I can try installing PADS again.  Told Ray he might as well go ahead and do the receiving on it, since we might need support while we are trying to get it set up.

Juan and Michael Dean are here working.  We were going to try hooking them up from Dean's laptop to the Quartus license server on my PC.  Then I realized that yesterday when I installed the lmadmin tool recommended in the Mentor docs, it totally screwed up my old license server configuration managed through lmtools!  Very frustrating.  Juan and I fiddled around for a while trying to fix it but no luck.  Our best idea at the moment is to reinstall Quartus.  I uninstalled lmadmin and Juan pointed me at the ftp://ftp.altera.com site where the old 9.1 releases of Quartus are available.  Need to uninstall Quartus & reinstall it.  Do this later (Monday I guess).

What else is going on?  I tested George's copper rod (which, it turns out, was actually just copper-plated steel - he is ordering real copper ones) sitting on top of the Peltier plate, and it got soaking wet even coated with the spray-rubber stuff.  So it might not be an effective enough insulator.  One observation is that, if the material is porous, then it wouldn't actually prevent water vapor in the air from condensing on the metal surface.  We need a non-porous insulating material.

Samad brought by the new power connector (actually a short power cable assembly) and it fits, although I was surprised to see it was only a 20-pin connector, not 24.  He still needs a header so he can plug the other end of the cable into the power distribution board.  He has ordered it and is waiting for it to arrive.