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.

PC/104 format DIO card

As I have recently got a PC/104 capable PC (VIA EDEN) I have thought about putting together a small Digital Input/Output (DIO) board for this. In my spare parts I have found some of the famous Intels 82C55 chips and in the internet I have found a quite good looking schematic.

http://technologyinterface.nmsu.edu/4_1/4_1s.html

This kind of interface is a typical application of an ISA device - U1 - U3 are the buffers for the ISA interface, U7 is the address decoder and U9 - U10 generate the /CS signal for the 8255 for all the four addresses (8255 has four addresses - three for three 8 bit ports and one for control word). U10 seems to be a bit spare, so I decided to get rid of it and to add a switch for the address decode. Still it seems to be a bit complicated, but you really need all that glue logic to force it to work good. You can always interface it directly to the ISA, but this is highly unrecommended.

After having the complete schematic I started routing the board. So now the first problems emerged - It is really hard to fit all these ICs into PC/104 size format. Really, really hard. And not to mention to rout everything! so this is how it looks for now.

I have to redesign it completely I guess - rip-up every trace and start from scratch, as I have forgot to place the SUBD connector, and put everything into the same layer... this is not the best solution, especially when you are limited only to a double sided printed circuit board.

For sure I will post some more info when I finish redesigning the PCB.

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.