Although there is much work to be done, there have been numerous important contributions to developing the Auger fluorescence electronics. Daniel Camin is coordinating electronics work for the Italian prototype. He also organized a workshop at CERN one year ago. Important ideas have been provided by Valerio Bocci, Dave Kieda, Ashot Chilingarian, Zbigniew Szadkowski, and others. There is a common general approach to the problem.
Differences lie in the details.
Pushing forward the electronics development means working out details, so there is some danger of contention on issues where schemes differ in detail. Scientific contention is healthy as long as it does not lead to personal strife. We need to work through the difficult issues together. Following the method pioneered by the Fly's Eye, each pixel has a trigger condition which recognizes a pulse of photons that could be due to an air shower crossing its field of view, and then an event trigger occurs when a pattern of pixel triggers occurs that could plausibly be produced by an air shower track moving across the focal surface. Further processing of event triggers will be done in real time to recognize those that are especially likely to be genuine fluorescence air shower tracks so that the relevant information can be broadcast to the surface array and other eyes.