VME card ejectors

We use the Schroff ejectors. The classic eurocard stops about 0.1" shy of the back of the front panel, but sometimes we cheat and close the gap to almost zero, for various reasons.

Did I send you my board layout? I forget. If you're using my dims, I could send you a few Schroff ejectors and a panel to try, and a solder-sample bare board, just for fun. Heck, I could just send you a whole VME module.

Hmmm... our standard board (the standard setback one) is 160 mm wide, with the ejector hole 140 mils in from the front edge of the board.

Our longer board, the one that hits the rear of the front panel, is

6.400" wide, 162.56 mm, and the ejector hole is 240 mils from the board edge.

John

VME?!?! Wow, I remember VME... barely.

We used Schroff for VME front panels and hardware. They used to advertise regularly for custom VME front panels in trade magazines ... and a picture of my panel was always the one in the middle.

We never had problems with fit on the board. And it has been such a long time since I've worked with these - I can't help with dimensions.

Good luck, Ed

Liar! You got them pulling on your dick.

Another forgery by Lamey The ForgeTard.

VME is doing well in the aerospace biz. Its demise has been predicted for decades, and it continues to grow. CPCI was to be one of its many predicted killers, based on leveraging commercial silicon, but that silicon turned out to have half-lives measured in years or maybe months, which isn't good for product lifetime. PCI sucks anyhow, with its complexity and limited electrical bus length.

There has been some consolidation in VME, especially with GE Fanuc "pulling a Vishay" and buying up everybody in sight. That has resulted in a lot of boards going unsupported or obsolete, which is fine by me.

What's bizarre is how many people are fighting for the VME embedded PC business, which sounds like a horrific amount of work to sell a Pentium-based VME master card for numbers like $2K, when I can sell a waveform generator for over twice that.

John

Yes, I've got your CAD file.

Ah, that's why. We had used the dims from the Interfacebus web site for the ejectors because they were somewhat of an "afterthought". So I guess we won't be able to use ejectors :-(

And we used 240mils on the ones that didn't hit the panel. Sigh...

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com

So did we. But they seem to be in the habit of not answering emails.

We are actually using the VME as a HW-addressed SPI bus and, gasp, at

3.3V. But don't tell anyone about that, might be against some kind of unspoken law...

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com

Just like lots of people predicted the demise of CD4000 logic 1-2 decades ago. Luckily I did not listen.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com

Yeah, I thought so. No idea why some people have to do that.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com

It's a 115 drill, so you could re-drill it 100 mils closer to the front. The ugly figure-8 hole would be mostly hidden under the extractor. Might work.

Hey, we're getting together a box full of old boards to go the the dump. Want any?

John

I partially agree on this one. Being in the Aerospace biz myself - I saw a sudden downturn the past couple years. But there is still a lot-o-stuff out there.

I don't agree that CPCI sucks ...at least not as far as functionallity. But - I did get burned on controllers recently. When I used to make VME cards - I used the PLX VME-2000 and VME-3000 chip set. Very simple to use and they were great... in theory. But, we found there to be far too many infant mortality deaths with the VME-3000 parts. Because of this - we avoided PLX when designing PCI interface and went with the AMCC Matchmaker series. These have been excellent parts for us... up until about a week ago. AMCC announced they are giving up on AMCC Matchmaker series and dropping their PCI controllers. Yup, high and dry in a couple months. Now back to PLX -- evaluating their PCIe PEX8311 part. Looks good so far.

hmmm "pulling a Vishay". Yeah, got burned on a capacitor recently. Vishay took over one of the UCC capacitor lines... and hiked the prices by 33%... barstards!

Yeup. Our card went for $12K when we sold out VME version. Our card's embedded processors had more processing umph than the CPU at the time... Sad to say that our embedded processor has now become the bottle neck (as well as obsolete).

-- Ed

Thankfully these didn't dissappear. I use a ton of these. Too bad the standard TTL logic has shot up so horrentously in the past two years. Standard 7404's were 5 cents each.. now nearly 15x that.

The parts I'm hurting on the most right now. Old (REAL old) 6800 series parts such as 6821's as well as 6502's and 6532's. I could use tons of these if I found a reliable and reasonable source.

But - what I wish somebody would do is create a generic 40 pin DIP packaged PLD with enough gates, RAM, etc in order to create a 6502 or a 6800 or 6821 or whatever. Stock one part - program it to be whatever you need at the momemt. Great idea..but probably lousy to make practical.

-- Ed (OK -- my second job & hobby is with old arcade equipment such as pinball machines)

["Followup-To:" header set to sci.electronics.design.]

I simply love the 4000B series, including the somewhat chaotic choice of functions. It's definetely pre-CPU (pre-bus-architecture in general) age.

robert

VME is so simple you can do it with TTL gates. We usually use a smallish Spartan FPGA as our VME-CPU interface, and embedd maybe a

256-word transparent dual-port memory inside, shared between the VME bus and our embedded uP. It's easy. The bus part of a system should be trivial and not gobble up much real estate.

Yup. CPUs don't stay in production long, especially Intel CPUs. We're still using MC68332's, which seem to be hanging in pretty well.

John

Thanks for the offer but we don't need any right now. Yesterday I checked the Schroff box and it's one of those geared for front panels. From the holes to the upper and lower aluminum profile it's >400mils, meaning that even if we had the ejectors at the right depth they would not be able to grab. Drat. Oh well...

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com

I am using Japanese caps in my designs :-)))

Panasonic et al.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com

When visiting an old client recently I found that one of my 80C51 designs is still in production. Almost 13 years now and counting.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com

How about an FPGA/CPLD on an adapter board, with a core? e.g.:

Cheers! Rich

Right. But that's the same when buying cloth insulated litz wire. Our Towe's Ford Museum could whip you up a spool but it'll cost ya. I said good bye to standard TTL almost the instant 74HC came out. Not 74HCT, I never liked those. 74HC is cheap, uses next to nothing in quiescent power and works nicely on batteries such as 2-3 AA cells.

If you can live with ye olde 74LS04 those are a lot cheaper.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com