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Design-stage concept — nothing built. The figures are verified against the parts' sheets and the parts before a board is made.

Argus is the Bifrost card with nothing on its ATTN pin — the same board, the same firmware, the low level at boot making it an Argus (../). It has no sensor of its own: it is a NodBus unit on a Bifrost port whose whole job is to carry small clocked units, the mini-NODs — Gauss, Quark-Tubes, Pascal, types 1–3 of the mini space. Four of its six USARTs each drive one NodBus mini segment, the fifth is its link up to the Bifrost, the sixth that link's echo receiver.

NodBus mini is NodBus with an 8 B payload — the same framing, the same TDMA, the same wire clock, the same TYPE«4 | NUMBER addressing — at the Argus's own rung, 2¹⁹, on all four segments. It is synchronous, so the slot is the time: a record assembles because it arrived when it was due, with no marker and no age field. A segment costs a whole UART, because TDMA needs a continuous ear — that is the price of the timing, and it is why ModBus, which shares one UART among many, stays in the station for what needs no clock.

Eight sondes a card, the same eight as a Bifrost. Glass is point-to-point and copper may chain, so eight optical sondes are two Arguses. Upstream an Argus tiles four 8 B mini payloads into one 32 B payload at positions fixed at enrollment and takes ⌈sondes/4⌉ NUMBERs of its own type, 3: four full-rate Gauss are one slot, eight are two. The segment table the card reports decodes the positions; no byte is added.

It stands in the enclosure on a crossed in-box cable to a Bifrost port, or at a distance behind Galvani boards. Every segment leaves on Galvani boards, because a mini-NOD stands outside.

   BIFROST port ══ the up port, 2²² ══▶ ┌─────────────────────────┐ ══ segment 1, 2¹⁹ ══▶ mini-NODs
   no time bus: ATTN low                │ ARGUS — the card, H523  │ ══ segment 2 ══▶      Gauss · Quark-Tubes · Pascal
                                        │ 1 up + its echo,        │ ══ segment 3 ══▶      each segment a whole USART,
                                        │ 4 segments              │ ══ segment 4 ══▶      8 B TDMA
                                        └─────────────────────────┘
        four 8 B payloads tiled into one 32 B payload · ⌈sondes/4⌉ NUMBERs up the port

Hardware: CERN-OHL-P v2 (../../LICENSE-HW) · Software: MIT (../../LICENSE) — Copyright (c) 2026 NIC — Native Intellect Community