From owner-freebsd-hackers Sat Feb 3 00:18:34 1996 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id AAA07902 for hackers-outgoing; Sat, 3 Feb 1996 00:18:34 -0800 (PST) Received: from genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au (genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au [129.127.96.120]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with ESMTP id AAA07894 for ; Sat, 3 Feb 1996 00:18:32 -0800 (PST) Received: from msmith@localhost by genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au (8.6.12/8.6.9) id TAA00971; Sat, 3 Feb 1996 19:04:07 +1030 From: Michael Smith Message-Id: <199602030834.TAA00971@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au> Subject: Re: Watchdog timers (was: Re: Multi-Port Async Cards) To: bakul@netcom.com (Bakul Shah) Date: Sat, 3 Feb 1996 19:04:07 +1030 (CST) Cc: msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au, hackers@freebsd.org In-Reply-To: <199602020824.AAA12804@netcom22.netcom.com> from "Bakul Shah" at Feb 2, 96 00:24:00 am MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-hackers@freebsd.org Precedence: bulk Bakul Shah stands accused of saying: > > > > May be one of those single board computers (aka SBC) built > > > around a 286 will do the trick? 2ser+1par+memory+cpu etc. > > > are all on an ISA card and you can plug one or more of these > > > in an ISA `passive backplane'. If you are in the SF Bay > > > I can think of better and cheaper ways to make smoke with > > my computer. Stuffing alfoil into the ISA slots comes to mind. > > Care to elaborate? Perhaps you are generalizing your own bad > experience a bit too far? There are all sorts of ISA cards > with memory,cpu,IO etc. -- nothing magic in that. A PC motherboard is not a 'passive backplane'. If you're keen to understand better, I suggest you invest in one of these cards and try it out. Don't expect both the motherboard and the card to survive the experience, although you may be lucky. > > IIRC, these guys are F1-based. Try getting P&A on an F1 these > > days. > > No, {handy,mini}board use E9 which has 2K eeprom. The HC711E9 has 512 bytes of EEPROM and 12K of EPROM. It's also unavailable. The only two members of the 'E' series that can be had are the SEC811E2, which I've already mentioned my intention of using, and the XC711E20, which is a plastic OTPROM part with 20K of EPROM and 512 bytes of EEPROM. It'd be OK, except that it's too expensive. > The point was that if people just want some sort of watchdog > gizmo, starting from existing kits/boards is a lot faster. > Pie-in-the-sky boards are fun to dream about but they never > get built. 'Faster' is somewhat relative here, especially when you suggest designs that can't possibly work, or for which parts are not readily available. -- ]] Mike Smith, Software Engineer msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au [[ ]] Genesis Software genesis@atrad.adelaide.edu.au [[ ]] High-speed data acquisition and (GSM mobile) 0411-222-496 [[ ]] realtime instrument control (ph/fax) +61-8-267-3039 [[ ]] "wherever you go, there you are" - Buckaroo Banzai [[