Mysterious hardware, part 3.

So finally I have obtained an ISA-equipped PC that would be relatively new (a industrial grade P4) that allowed me to install Win XP and LabView software in order to debug the card, or at least try to do that. The motherboard was kindly donated by an elektroda.pl user and blog-reader nicknamed music. Thank you!

Using a simple LabView software I tried to write and listen to/from the cards addresses (that I know, as I can configure the 7 MSB by jumpers). It is quite easy to do that, as LabView offers InPort and OutPort commands that allow me to directly talk to the bus. As I do not believe that it can be so easy I have hooked an oscilloscope to the cards address lines and address decoder output in order to check if it's working or not. And it is.

Unfortunately I did not get any response from the card. Two options are: the card (or cards CPLD at least) is dead or that the communication protocol is more complicated. I'm in favor of the latter. For now I have no further idea what to do with this piece of hardware apart from trying to read the CPLD content. As I do not have any cable for Lattice ICs and any proof that this approach will be valuable I just put the card back on shelve. At some point maybe I will come back - to further work with it or scrap it, as there are plenty of nice and rare ICs there.

VMEBus crate - why not.

Recently I have acquired an VME CPU-Card and thought about testing it somehow. As after powering it up the card seemed to be alive I have decided to give it a shot and try to put together an VME crate.

For that I have used an old Eurorack that I have got from some phone central (or some similar telecommunications equipment). After checking that the size of the crate is standard I bought an backplane from e-bay for... 1 Euro (plus 12 for shipping, but that's not the case). Unfortunately only this backplanes are so cheap, regular VME equipment is pricey as hell.

So i have started from taking apart the old backplane:

And putting the new one:

Sorry for the mess. You can see that here the backplane is already in position, and connected to a power supply (it takes 5 V and +/- 12 V). The PSU is also taken from the same equipment that the crate is.

This (above) is the CPU card (on the left) with the display controller removed, and the display controller itself (on the right). The CPU Card is an Pentium 120 MHz with 64 MB RAM equipped with Universe Tundra VMEBus controller. Fortunately there are plenty of drivers for this PCItoVME bridge. The cards equipment covers a wide range of peripherals - starting from two serial and one parallel port, going through VGA, Ethernet and finishing with SCSI-II. The card has two PCI-compatible slots, one of which is occupied by the display controller. It also has an PC/104, ISA compatible socket. The SCSI, together with the FDD connector are on the P2 connector of the VMEBus, so I will have to make a special connector going from the P2 on the backside of the backplane  to the SCSI harddrive. As far as I have tested the CPU-card is fully functional so after I get some free time I will try to connect an SCSI HDD to this setup and install some Linux maybe. After that I plan to go back to few years ago when I was studying and try to re-learn VHDL in order to make some VME cards for this setup

IBM PS/2 Model 30-286

Some time ago I have bought this PC to finally have an 286 in my collection. It arrived a bit dirty but fully operational.

Although the case was a bit dirty the insides do not have much dust on them. It seems that the computer was stored in a rather nice place. The PC has a 286@10MHz CPU and around 1 meg of RAM. As this is obviously not enough formy taste I decided to add an RAM-card that was laying in my workshop from ome time. It seems to work, but gives 'only' 3712 KB of RAM. I guess this is only due to the jumper settings of the RAM-card, that I have to play with in the nearest future.

To enrich this machine even more and to allow it to have some connection to the outside world I have also added an Xircom Pocket Ethernet adapter (with RJ45 connector) to plug it to my ethernet at some point. A neat thing, that you may see here are the ports of that machine - keyboard and mouse uses PS/2 connectors which I find very convenient, when plugging it into my Compaq KVM (not so retro, I know).

As this machine is fully operational at the moment, with IBM-DOS on board (I do not remember the number) only thing that needs work here is the memory. The machine itself can take up to 4 megs of RAM on board, an the RAM-card should give additional 3 megs, making it 7 total - quite impressive for an 286. Additionally I plan to buy an 287 coprocessor and put it in, so I can try to test some calculations, why not. I have two more ISA slots so maybe I'll populate them with some other board in the future (a full-length data acquisition card would fit just right).

Mysterious hardware, part 2.

Okay, so I had some spare time to tinker with the Analog I/O card. Unfortunatelly I do not have much info now:

• On the DB50 connector on the bracket are signals from/to all the MUXes, this means 32 analog ports. Most probably analog inputs. The rest of the signals on the bracket connector is unknown.
• The card is electrically okay. It did not crash the computer I have inserted it in.
• the adressing uses only 10 bit, from which 7 MSB are to be configured by jumpers. This should help me to talk/listen to ports of the card.

Now this project is going a bit on hold. I have to obtain a motherboard with ISA connector and as powerful as possible (for the sake of convinience). I have locates several like that, so this is matter of time only. The problem is that I do not have any PC that 1) has OS on it, 2) is able to fit the card inside. And also - I would not like to test a '97 card on a '90 PC. It is hard without complicating it like that ;).

Mysterious hardware, part 1.

Some time ago I have acquired this card. It has plenty of interesting ICs on it, so I though about buying it before thinking about any use of it or at lest checking if there are any manuals and/or drivers.

The card was produced by a german company disys GmbH. The manufacturer showed me a general middle finger by saying that this card is unsupported, the backup with manuals and drivers and any other possible documentation is gone/dead/broken buuuuuuuut they could possibly try to find the documentation if I pay around 500 euro. Come on - how greedy a company has to be and how messy it has to be inside to ask something like that. If you ask me, this does not tell any good about the company.

None the less I intend to, at least, try to make this card working again. In order to do this first I need to identyfy some kind of drivers for this device and then do whatever is needed to interface to it. I guess this is worth the labor, as this card seems to have various interesting features, judging by the ICs that are on board:

Lattice ispLSI1032 - a 60 MHz CPLD, together with several HCTs and PALs working as the glue logic I guess.  Also three FIFO CMOS Memory ICs (50MHz AM7210), what suggests that the card should has some fast input (up to 50 MHz I guess). The card also has two Nec D71054 CMOS 8MHz counters. There is an 74HCT688 address decoder, that is close to the address jumpers (not seen here). I hope this will allow me to get the card physical address in order to start debugging.

The analog section is quite interesting. The card is capable of having D/A (digital to analog) and A/D  (analog to digital) converters together with PGAs (programmable gain amplifier) and analog MUXes (multiplexer). Unfortunately not all sockets are filled. In the D/A section is completely empty (not counting a single transistor Q600 and three precise potentiometers TR600..602. The Q600 is an RFL1P08 P-channel MOSFET from Harris. 

The A/D section is partially filed. There is one A/D converter - ADS7804 by Burr Brown and an programmable amplifier PGA202, also by Burr Brown. The ICs on the right are two CMOS analog multiplexers - DG506. 

There is also an DC/DC converter on the board, but it is missing an transformer, as far as I understand. The Converter is controlled by MAX743

There are also several connectors for additional features. One, neat the DC/DC converter is called XBUS, and the second one is near the output of the card. The second one is designated "Add On Board Stecker", and probably is designed for a daughterboard or something similar.

The output of the card is a single DB50 connector seen below. Up to now I do not know any pinout of it, but this is one of the first thing I'm willing to check. Second thing that I plan to is checking if the board is electrically okay and putting it into a working PC in order to try to run some tests.  

Selling 387 FPUs

As now I have three FPUs:

...two of these coprocessor are for sale, both are on Allegro:

IIT 3C87-33

ULSI Math*Co DX

386 update

As I have recently acquired an 3C87-33 math coprocessor from IIT, I have thought about getting back to finishing the 386 setup I have.

I managed to install the coprocessor easily, despite its bent legs. The POST test and BIOS info claims that the IC is working which is a very good info for me. Additionally I have recently acquired an 3com Etherlink II 8 bit ISA Ethernet card. This card also is installed now in the 386 machine. This means that all five ISA slots are currently occupied. wow.

Pictures update:

The inserted shiny FPU (left), next to the grim, black CPU. You migh note that the 3C87 FPU is rated for 33 MHz and the CPU is running at 40 MHz... that's true, but still the FPU works, beeing overclocked a little  (20%, heh).

Two empty 8 bit slots on thie riser for the I/O card and ethernet controller. Everything is so crammed here that I had to remove the power supply in order to put the FPU and cards inside. You might note that there are still empty RAM slots - this will be filled as soon as I get some 30 pin SIMM sticks.

3com Etherlink II ethernet (UTP and AUI) card. An 8 bit ISA NIC, a thing that you do not see often. I hope It will work properly under MS-DOS or something similar.

Everything packed together except the PSU.

PC summary from BIOS. Still no success with the FDDs. This is the only lacking hardware issue to solve now. Apart from that everything is working alright I guess.

Back connectors - an overwiew. Starting from the top left:

COM                      COM                     VGA

MIDI/Gameport         LPT                 SCSI-1

UTP        AUI           Digital I/O card bracket.

Lots of outputs :-).

Now I have to fix some minor issues with the FDD controller and install MS-DOS on this setup to run some tests (especially I would love to test the floating point math of the 3C87). After that? installing software I guess - some calculation software would be good (mathematica?) and Turbo C I guess, to develop my own software and to use the digital I/O card.

Car PC, vintage style, part 3

So I have started debugging the Car PCs software and getting really into programming on that thing. I have divided the work into several 'modules' so I can gather information about one specific part of the device, independent of the rest.

1. Keypad:
Fairly simple, or event very simple. You can program it to output any character you want to using some dedicated software that I do not have. Currently the arrow keys on the front-panel go a b c d and enter is just enter.

2. LCD:
Quite easy. There are two ways of using the character LCD on the front panel: with or without drivers. If one  wants to do everything manually Data bus is under 0A9h indexed through port 22h and the control  bus is under 0A8h indexed through port 22h. Also there is a *.COM driver that allows to remap the first four lines to the LCD. The driverless version of LCD control seems nicer to me, as long as the LCD used in the PC is a HD44780 compatible.

3. GPS:
Harder. Now I know only that the GPS is residing at COM1 interface. I hope this is a fairly standard COMport GPS device and will work with nearly standard communication protocol.

4. I/O:
There is a CAN interface, Analog in and Digital in/out. Still no clues how to get to that.

5. Front panel connector:
Localized and nearly ordered.

6. Sound card:
probably there is one.

That's all for now I guess.

Geode is up and running

So I have managed to run the Geode setup. Instead of an hard drive I have utilized a Disk on Module SSD. You might note that there is a second floppy disc drive connected. This is due to the first ones malfunction. I hope a good isopropanol cleaning will be enough for it to run one more.

On that I have installed MS-DOS 6.22 together with Norton Commander and a Borland Turbo C Proffesional bundle. In the bundle there is Turbo C, Turbo Debugger and Turbo Profiler. The first two will be used to work with the Car PC.

Car PC, vintage style, part 2

So I have managed to run this piece of hardware. It powers up when 12 V is applied to some pins of the back connector:

So this means that this hardware is worth the work I will put into it. After double checking if everything that I was able to check is alive (LCD, VGA out, keypad) I removed the flash disc (8 MB Disk-on-Chip), and carefully placed it in the Geode PC (as it is my only running PC with DoC slot). Geode booted from the DoC, as it has no operting system at the moment. It seems that this PC is running a normal MS-DOS - yay! On the DoC I have found also some applications for this system - this will be disassembled soon. Also this means that I will have to put the Geode in working condition - put an HDD inside (there is a 20 GB HDD waiting) and install MS-DOS or something compatible, together with an C compiler, disassembler and what not.

Second thing I have noted is the connector for the Car PC:

This connector has COM, VGA and most important a Keyboard signals inside. The last thing is quite crucial at the moment I guess. It will allow me to install a normal MS-DOS on the DoC and add some hardware sniffing and testing programs. This is a must if I want to use it (and I do).

So - things to do:

1. Finish working on the Geode (HDD, OS - MS-DOS, software).
2. Get the round 19 pin connector for the front-panel of the Car PC.

Car PC, vintage style, part 1.

Recently I have bough, out of curiosity, something called "bordcomputer küpper weisser infotech" - whatever it migh mean, it was sold as a scrap, rather than tested and working device. I bought it mainly because it has an VGA port, so I guessed it also might have an real PC inside. This is how it looks from the outside:

So, the first thing to do, as a reverse engineer, I had to do was to open it, and see whats 's inside. I was kinda lucky, as the stuff inside was the stuff I wanted to be inside. What I have found and identified:

Smart486PC from Digital-Logic is the main part of this PC. This is the actual PC here. Fortunately I found a manual for that system-on-chip. Above that you can see a GPS module and on the right there is a 3V Lithium accumulator and a Disk-on-Chip with 8 MB of space. On the left from the smart486PC module there is an PC/104-shaped connector, that probably IS an PC/104, why not.

Such a setup means that this could be perhaps used as an PC. Regular, DOS-Compatible PC. The plan is to  power this thing up and see what happens next. If it will show some kind of normal startup  then the next step is to try to put something more generic on the Disk-on-chip. How? No idea, although the BPC is equipped with DoC socket. Then - deassemble everything that is in the firmware of this device and try to write own firmware. 

the Touching Ending

Finally I have completed the Book-Sized PC (BPC) that I was writing recently. The final step was adding a touch screen to the system as I intend to use this setup for controlling some processes (details will be given when this plans will come closer to realization).

So, I have acuired a LCD and TS and a controller recently,from a dismantled CNC controller. The only problem was the fact that the whole thing was dead. Really dead. With the LCD it was quite simple - totally exploded power supply and dead capacitors. Piece of cake (actually I just bought a new 12 V power supply).

The harder part was with the touch screen controller. Apparently it's PSU did something nasty when dying, as I have encountered really burned pcb:

Power filtering capacitor was totally fried, together with pcb - few layers deep. Fortunately only this was destroyed, and the 3M EXII ASIC was alive. Unfortunately I do not have any pictures of this fixed, as I forgot to make a photo before installing it in the LCD.

The last problem was with the configuration, but this was only software related. 3Ms drivers do not work well when you want to have multiple displays with only one beeing touch-sensitive. But I do not need multiple displays at the moment (although I can have up to three of them).

PC/104 DIO Card - final form

I have worked on the schematic of the digital I/O card based on the 82C55 for the SBC computer I have recently acquired and came with a final schematic - simplified as much as possible - and a PCB project. Here it is:

The schematic is simplified, yet it does comply with the PC/104 or ISA standard. There are three buffers - two for generic use - addresses and control signals (AEN, IOR, IOW, and RESET). Third buffer is utilized for data bus, and its control is a bit more tricky - the direction of the buffer is controlled by the buffered IOR signal and it is enabled by the ADDR signal that is generated in the addres decoder. For that part I have utilized a 8 bit comparator, so I can place the device in any address in the whole address space on 10 bits. Two LSB bits of the address are only buffered and feed to the 82C55 as it does all the magic. In that way I got rid of the strange address decoder of the old project and simplified generation of the Chip Select signal for the 82C55 - now it is selected by the ADDR signal from the address decoder.

The board layout is now much simpler with enough space to fit and DC25 connector, like shown below.

I plan to send the project soon to have PCBs made and start soldering the whole thing. I have several ideas how to use this PC, but can not say anything for now. I'll keep you informed :).

New machines, new plans.

Recently - last weekend - I was gifted with two new machines for my collection. One of them is a VIA EDEN SBC in the 3,5" form factor and the second is a PICMG 1.0 single card PC with a Pentium MMX.

The first machine has various industry features, like 4 COM ports, PC/104 interface and a completely fanless cooling. I plan to build several cards for the PC/104 interface (starting with the DIO card seen below). This way I will have an powerfull, ethernet-enabled machine booting from an Compac Flash card for managing the I/O features of any system. Below is the photo of the current state of the motherboard with the heatsink. Not very impressive, isn't it?

The second PC that I was gifted with is a PICMG 1.0 processor card with a Pentium MMX CPU. Accidentaly I had such backplane and a dedicated rackmount housing for such a card. Below is a photo of the whole set - the card in the housing. Currently only the power is connected to the board, as I had time only to check if the card is alive. The next step is to complete the whole interior - FDD, CD and a 2,5" HDD. I will probably put an DIO card inside, or leve the only ISA/PCI slot empty and waiting for 'better times' ;-).

The inventory page of my blog is also updated a bit, there is a summary of all the machines I currently have. I revise it from time to time.

Book-sized PC - alive.

I'm back after some time of being occupied by other tasks, that were not worthy of being published here ;-). I have completed my book-sized industrial PC.

I have received this machine some time ago from a friend of mine. It was used in his company in some complicated systems, and had it's BIOS exchanged for a custom one. This was the first and only big problem about this machine. I have tried exchanging the BIOS from the 'inside' using AWDFlash, but with no success, so I had to ask the same friend for more help - he burned the EEPROM with a proper BIOS *.bin file using a EEPROM burner. Now it worked, so I only had to install the OS (Win XP Proffesional SP2) and all drivers.

For this PC I have obtained (from ebay) a Nvidia Quadro NVS 200 PCI graphics card (64 MB) capable of feeding two VGAs (I'm currently using one, but plan to use two, why not). Apart from that - Pentium III 633 MHz (overclocked 550 MHZ Coppermine) and 512 MB of RAM (chipsets maximum unfortunately). The more interesting part of the PC is the I/O PCI card that I have added - seen on top. This is an DIO card (Digital I/O) - 16 relay inputs and 16 photo-isolated inputs. This will go very well with the whole array of ports the card has: four serials (RS-232/422/485 configurable), two parallels and two USBs.

The PC is quite compact, so I guess there will be some trouble with heat inside, especially when I will exchange the processor for a PIII Tualatin (preferably 1400 MHz PIII-S version) - this is the only upgrade that is still pending due to the lack of a suitable CPU, and general scarceness of such. Still this is a great addition to my collection and one of few that has potential application (but I do not want to say anything about that for now, as the grant proposal is sent but not graded by now). Next addition to this setup is a touch-screen LCD. It has a cool RS-232 interface, so it should not be hard to put it together. The harder part is to put the touch-screen part and the LCD part together without breaking anything. I have to find proper tape for mending it together and a foam spacer tape for making a spacer between the LCD and touch-screen.

I would like to thank again the 'anonymous' donors: of this machine and many more things ;-) for donating my collection with extremely nice hardware and helping me put it together.

Small update

I'm still alive! Not much was done recently, but there were some minor changes in the Inventory. I've added more RAM to the 486 machine, now it has magnificent 64MB of RAM. On the other hand I took 2MB of 386 RAM in order to put it into the Sound Blaster AWE32 card that is fitted now in the 486 machine. Last but not least I've found a bracket to mount the HDD in the case of the 386, so now it has an SCSI drive.

As for the plans - I'm still waiting for another desktop AT case a friend of mine promised me ;-). When it will arrive I will be able to fit the 486 there. After that I will start installing stuff on the PCs - DOS 6.22 OR some linux (probably deli(cate) or some other, suitable for low-end computers). After instaling basic OS there will be time to install hardware goodies in the PCs - I/O card etc. I'll keep you all informed for sure.

In the mean time I have to fix my Amiga to have it 100% usable OR finish the 2MB chip hack I'm working on. Probably this will be the first thing I'll do, as it needs only to solder few wires and to put it back in the original case.

After all that I have an LCD with touchscreen to run, that a friend gave me. It will be fun to have a touchscreen with one of the PCs.

Building an 386 system

Sooo, finally I've put together 386 system that I've got from a guy that was cleaning his garage and getting rid of this machine. First of all I dismantled the whole computer and cleaned the housing. After that the battery on the motherboard was removed, because it was leaky. Electrolyte fortunately haven't done much damage so I've only had to clean the pcb.

After that I've soldered a new battery and put everything together. Although the motherboard has normal ISA slots this housing uses a riser card. This card is plugged into one of the 16 bit ISA slots and offers two 8 bit and three 16 bit ISA slots.

At the current moment the spec of this machine are: 386DX-40 and 16MB RAM. The graphics card is a Trident TVG9000 with 512k of RAM. In the computer you can also see SCSI controller. It's an AHA1540B with 50pin HDD interface (SCSI-1 and SCSI-2 compatible) and with 34pin FDD controller. Also in one of the 8bit slots I've put an I/O controller with serial, paralel and game ports - what a convienient usage of these ports. I still have to connect the floppies and HDD in order to install anything on this machine. After that I have an Scientific Solutions board ready for that PC. It's an 96 digital I/O card. I hope to run some parallel feed digital-to-analog converters on that.

As you can see I've added an second page for my blog called Inventory (see top). I plan to put there all the stuff that I have at home. At the current moment only some of the computers are fully described, the rest is waiting for the description or to be fixed/completed/put together.