PC 104 questions for newbie

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leutholl 20 years ago

Hi,

I'm new here ad new to PC 104. I have a PC104 system in front of me having:

- RS232 port

- MVB/CAN Bus interface

- Parallel port

- PS/2 keyboard port

- special connector to a touchscreen which i have (working!)

- some little rotary switch to dial in a address for something in hexadecimal (now it is 0xF and 0xF)

- a loudspeaker output

everything boots fine. Having DOS 6.22 installed. There is a Flash or similar memory acting as drive c: size is 8MB! RAM is 16MB I can use XMS with himem.sys

So what I have is a DOS 6.22 system with a nice touchscreen. My question is: I want to do something usefull with this. Something like a home automation controller. I can write software in c/c++, vb, c# and could go back to old qbasic, pascal times. So how can I build up a development environment for this PC104 device? How would you write a graphical user interface under DOS? Can I develop under WinXP and test my software in DOS? how can I transfer my program to the pc104 flash? There is interlnk/intersvr installed in the DOS maschine - I know this communication from old times but there must be a easier way. I don't want to disassemble the PC104 board stack to get access to the flash or "disk on flash" - even if I could how could I use this flash? Is it possible to use the MVB/CAN bus interface. I know nothing about this card, and I don't know how to control a interface which is not presenting itself to the OS like RS232, parallel etc. Same for the loudspeaker. Do I have to use qbasic or pascal on a winXP maschine to write my program, or is there a framework for graphical interfaces under DOS which is easy to learn. Should I install a very small installation of Linux? How do I have access to the bios?

Sorry for all those questions, I want to handicraft something of use with this nice board... ;-)

Thanks, leutholl

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Paul Burke 20 years ago

Borland C++ or M$ VC V1.5 or Watcom or one of several others. You might want to skip DOS and use something like linux or FreeRTOS or ecos, in which case you might need the appropriate tools- probably gcc.

formatting link

there are others (GEM etc.)

Can I develop under

via floppy, via a serial link, ethernet.... there will have to be a loader program of some sort running on the PC.

There should be a flash loader program with the board's utilities. probably runs under DOS.

That's a case of read the manual.

Just play around is the best thing. You can get started just with DOS, a hard drive, and borland and just get designing little programs till you get confident.

Paul Burke

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leutholl 20 years ago

Am Wed, 22 Mar 2006 08:13:42 +0000 schrieb Paul Burke:

Thanks very much for the link and some graphical interfaces, maybe I wasn't clear enough to describe that I want to have a graphical toolkit under DOS where I can programm my own graphical componentes. What I want to do is the use the system for home automation and to place some buttons on the screen. If you touch a button, something shall be sent on the serial port. That's all. I don't need a graphical interface like a programm, just to have a nice DOS. Maybe I don't understand but Spectra is nice to play around but not to customize and program and use it as a graphical library.

Now some question about the hardware - sorry for the long thread!

I opened the PC104 stack an I found a: little mainboard with a DiskOnChip and lot's of unsed connectors. I now the ISA 8 and 16bit bus but there are other cables on two modules. 3x 10 pin ( left and right of an additional 26pin and one extra) What are these for? Then a 40pin and a 34pin - is this a IDE and Floppy port? Would be cool!

The manufacer is EUROTECH the board is a PC059610A. There is also a big ACC Micro 2089 IC on it.

Then for the MVB/CAN bus card: its a duagon board with a babylon D104 chip. I don't know a single thing about how to access this board without a driver... Maybe somebody could help me here.

Finally, something like a I/O board having a special connector for the touchscreen and a CHIPS F65535 chip - this could be the VGA controller?!? On the board are various serial ports, parallel ports, a loudspeaker output (amplified). The four connectors I descripted above on the mainboard are connected with this card. This board also have the power supply connector (ATX) plus a battery for the BIOS or something.

So what to do with this nice board?

I don't think I can directly access the drive (well DiskOnChip rather than DiskOnFlash). so the only way seems to use to serial port and interlnk/intersvr on DOS.

Please share what you would suggest to me... thanks a lot!

Lukas

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PC 104 questions for newbie

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