Multistylus recording system

Abstract

A multistylus recorder uses a recording head having a plurality of side-by-side styli extending across the width of a recording medium which is driven at right angles to the recording head. The recording styli are individually energized to provide a recording on the recording medium using a digital control system for storing addresses of the recording styli to be energized whereby the recording styli are energized from the lowest to highest stored addresses. The recording system uses a minimum to maximum, min-max, accumulator to configure the digital data obtained from an analog-to-digital (A/D) converter representative of an input signal applied to the A/D converter into a format suitable for energizing the multistylus recording head, i.e., the min-max accumulator accepts and stores the digitized values obtained by sampling an input signal by the A/D converter and a sample and hold circuit to obtain a plurality of samples between recording operations to produce a plurality of outputs for energizing each of the plurality of recording styli. The min-max accumulator stores all of the digitized samples of the input data, selects the minimum and maximum digitized values of the input sample, produces stylus addresses for those values and energizes all of the styli between and including the lowest and highest stylus address received since the preceding recording cycle.