Cheapest PCI prototyping?

[e.stiebler]

Brad Parker wrote:
> 
> I've just never looked into pertec.  Is it ttl?  It would be interesting
> to see what signals you have to wiggle and how the data goes across.
> 
> I'm curious how you figured all that out.

probably reading the manuals ?
;-)

> yowza - that's huge.  I've never heard of anything writing blocks that
> big.  Mind if I ask *what* wrote them?

We did sometime pretty bg block directly via DMA fro a data acquisition 
system

>>The data rate is about 1.1MB/sec from what I've been able to determine.
6250*175 ?

>>I'd like a bunch of headroom.  I'd tried a 16-bit ISA interface (16 bits at
>>a toss) using PIO, but even with interrupts disabled, I was still losing  a
>>byte now and then, which leads me to suspect that I'm running on the edge.
> 
> Interesting.  Seems like 1MByte/sec might be an ISA maximum

without a small buffer for sure ...

> I wonder if you just added a fifo to cover the time interrupts might
> steal...  you could do that in a cpld these days.  yea, ok, sorry.  I
> just had to say it.

Just in case, with an FPGA you get the FIFO closer by ;-)

> 
>>The ideal solution would be a double-buffered bus-mastering DMA setup.
> yes, on pci.  but I think you'd still need a fifo to cover the arbitration.

PCI/FPGA/SDRAM. You can read in the whole tape in locally ;-)

> 
>>If I moved
>>the whole setup out of the PC box, using a small processor board with a
>>small hard disk and interfacing via USB or TCP/IP, I'd have a permanent
>>solution that should work with any host machine.  Even with today's
>>smallest hard disks, I could hold the contents of many tapes on one.
> 
> 
> Well that makes sense.  If you used something like a BrightStar
> IPEngine, you'd have a PPC which will run linux next to a nice FPGA
> which has some SRAM next to it.  With that you could easily make an
> interface which would pull all the data and you could stream it over
> ethernet using tcp so you would not loose any data.  You shouldn't need
> a disk.

USB is to slow for this, you need at least USB2. And then, you dont get 
to many cheap small controllers with USB2. Or you just go backwards to 
the idea before, get an 8051 with USB, a FPGA&SDRAM, read in the whole 
tape, and transfer it slowly over ...

Cheers