ISA cards

Bobrien

i was wondering if anyone could help me in using ISA cards on the propeller. I want to try to use ISA cards with the prop to take a load off of it's software.

deSilva

First you need a complete understanding of all the ISA bus signals...

Spork Frog

While it may be possible to handle ISA cards, I don't think it'd be real practical for the I/O lines needed and the amount of processing you'd still have to do in the Prop to handle the bus in the first place. Instead, I'd try interfacing together multiple props and have them talk to each other over some form of parallel.

Though if you have your heart set on ISA, here's a little something to get you started.

StefanL38

hello,

the ISA-bus-protocol makes a lot of overhead on top of what you really want to do
you will have a lot of effort implementing the ISA-protocol on the propeller
so it will be much eaysier to use an old pc (which has ISA-Slots)


Please could you explain what you mean by
"want to try to use ISA cards with the prop to take a load off of it's software."

do you want to use the "intelligence" of some isa-cards?

greetings
Stefan


write to the forum IN DETAILS what you want to do.
i think there are several ways to to this things without ISA-boards

deSilva

As ISA cards have no longer been produced for decades, they have become rare. Even returned PCs no longer contain them

However there are three kinds of quite useful cards even for the Propeller
- sound (containing high quality MIDI instrument synthesis)
- ethernet
- true VGA graphics

Talking to the ISA bus is not as complicated as you assume...
This is the main reason that it still survived so long, as many, many protyping was done using it...

(Edit: Especially the ISA 8bit I/O slave mode!)

Post Edited (deSilva) : 2/3/2008 10:46:32 AM GMT

stevenmess2004

I just had a look at PCI express on wikipedia. It says that they use a 2.5Gb/s speed but can you clock it slower than this? If you can would you be able to use these? (This is probably dreaming but you never know )

Steven

nutson

I find the idea very interesting. I have several high end ISA cards collecting dust (frame grabber, oscilloscope, DSP) and have considered building an ISA bus spy/controller for some time. Idea would be to monitor the bus in a PC running Win98 first, to collect the control codes send to the card. This could be done with the prop logic analyzer program or Viewport, and then have the prop take control of the card in the card in a passive backplane ISA bus. Writing prop software is more fun than hacking W98 programs. My imagination was triggered by Elektor magazine december 2007 describing an AVR controlled web server, using a recycled NE2000 ISA bus network card. This link http://www.mikrocontroller.com/de/einleitung.php gives more info (sorry, its German)

Nico Hattink

nutson

A link to the Elektor article http://www.elektor-electronics.co.uk/magazines/2007/december/avr-web-server.294062.lynkx

peterz

ISA cards are still in production. Under the PC104 format. Which incidentally is much more interesting to work with under the perspective of a Propeller.

There is at least one product that does precisely this: allows to use PC104/ISA cards under the control of a microcontroller.
It is made by Calmotion and is called the MC104p. It is built around the PIC18F8722. http://www.calmotion.com/pic18_104.html

I worked for some time with this board and is very interesting and plenty of good ideas. I had the chance to talk several times with the 'inventor'. It was very interestting to know how he had solved problems and which ones still remain to be solved.

Indeed a very interesting project for a Propeller based board too.

hippy

@ Bobrien : It would perhaps help if you were to say what sort of ISA card you were wishing to interface to. Some are fairly simple ( Ethernet NIC, Serial Port ), effectively using the ISA bus as an inter-link to the peripheral chips, data plus read/write lines, others can be more complicated to control.

Tubular

I would like very much to interface the Prop to a ISA based PC104 bus as a slave card.

My project involves emulating a DAS8 (DAS08) data acquisition card, but adding some auto gain / scaling features in the prop.

Then in future perhaps I can do away with the PC altogether for simple applications (just like that old movie where the man grows a pimple on his neck which grows into an evil second head which then tries to kill off the original)

I love the fact that a daq platform (das8) we adopted in 1983 is still going strong...

Bob Lawrence (VE1RLL)

Nico Hattink said...
This link http://www.mikrocontroller.com/de/einleitung.php gives more info (sorry, its German)

English version of the website: (other interesting projects on there as well)

translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mikrocontroller.com%2Fde%2Feinleitung.php&langpair=de%7Cen&hl=en&ie=UTF-8