Newsgroups: comp.sys.transputer From: Mark Booth Subject: Re: A Problem ? Organization: Oxford Intelligent Machines Ltd Date: Tue, 28 Oct 1997 11:28:33 +0000 Mime-Version: 1.0 Message-ID: In article <3450FE84.32F2B423@feeney.co.uk>, Peter simon Feeney writes >would like some constructive comments on this please >pete >[ A MIME text / rtf part was included here. ] Firstly, you might br more likely to recieve replys/followups if you didnt use stupid bloody mime attached news. 90% of the world either cannot decode or has to jump through hoops to extract and decode such news. Please, for your own sake if not for others, write articles directly into the news message. PS For those who cannot decode I have not removed any of the original text, just added my comments. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- >A Problem! >In the near future our beloved transputer boards will suffering the >shortage of a home in our computers. The P.c. is shortly to make >another leap in technology with the advent of different bus systems and >new interfaces to peripherals. The home of many of our systems is a >nice cosy ISA slot in our P.c.. Even the latest motherboards have one or two ISA slots at least. It would be crazy not to. There are so many legacy cards out there that motherboard manufctureres would be crazy to remove all slots. Plus if there is a market for it, I am sure that someone will design and market a PCI->ISA bridge board, consisting of a PCI card some glue logic and an ISA slot on it. > This slot will in the near future be no longer available to us when we >upgrade our systems as we inevitably will do, either forced into by the >systems dying or the fact that the operating system will no run fast >enough on our hardware. I think that operating systems are more of an issue than hardware interfacing. We are allready in the situation that we only have Win311 libraries for accessing Aserver, causing problems when writing for the Win95 platform. Sure, if you go back to iserver (not necessarily a bad thing *8') then you can get iserver drivers fot NT, but that doesnt help you too much communicating with modern 32bit apps. > So we will be forced either to dispose of our boards or put them on >the shelf to gather dust. This is some what of an a bad solution for >me. So before that date I have started to look at ways of continuing >the life of the board. So as long as the processors function there will >be use. Computing inevitably moves on. SGS have effectively stopped supporting us. Sure they are still selling the chips, so people can still make trams, but the software tools are not being developed. >Upon careful examination of the integrated circuits used, I feel that >there is a way to make the unit function externally. The design of the >C012 could be used to interface to a parallel port. This would allow >for admittedly a lower speed link than the ISA bus connection, but it >would communicate. We have a number of solutions. Our dual T225 and out T425 robot control boards have a number of external communications interfaces. Firstly they have a normal TTL link interface (including system services), secondly they have RS422 (differential) tranputer interfaces, for long distance and noise tolerant communications. Finally they have an RS232 serial interface. Thus for development and high bandwidth needs, we can connect by transputer links, for lower bandwidth comms (to code booted from rom) we can use a standard serial interface. >I therefore propose the construction of a housing in which a small >power supply with a fan, which would be connected to the card via an >ISA slot connector. The board would be mounted in the box on standard >pcb supports. The C012 ic would then be wired to a set of driver ics >for connection to a parallel port. There are allready PC card (nee PCMCIA) transputer interface cards, and I think that there are parallel port transputer interface cards, but I havnt used any of them. Have a search on the Web. >I welcome any constructive comments. >Peter simon Feeney Have fun peoples, Mark......... -- Mark Booth