Recognize these boards ? - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: Sjokolade
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: December 17, 2017, 01:00:39 am
content: I have a few boards that I don't know what is for, seen these before and do you know what these were used for ?I was not able to google them and I can't find info on them on Advantech site either.Board 1 : AD50300 REV.A01 DVM CARD ADVANTECH 1900503001Board 2 : AD50900 REV.A01 GPIB INFERFACE CARD 91081146 ADVANTECH 1900509000

author: Sjokolade
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: December 17, 2017, 01:02:49 am
content: Board 3 : AD50780 REV.A WIRING TERMINAL BOARD ADVANTECH 1900507800Board 4 : AD50010 REV.B 16CH RELAY MULTIPLEXER CARD

author: Sjokolade
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: December 17, 2017, 01:05:28 am
content: And an cpu board - don't know if AMD cpu is in right orientation as it was loose.ADVANTECH PCA-6136 REV.A1 1906613600

author: wraper
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: December 17, 2017, 01:32:25 am
content: All looks to be ISA cards, mostly 8 bit ones. CPU card is not device specific and can be used in different devices.http://support.elmark.com.pl/advantech/pdf/PCA-6136man.pdfCPU and math coprocessor seem to be inserted incorrectly. EDIT: there seem to be different revisions of this card so orientation is not certain.EDIT2: there are pin numbers written on silkscreen. Coprocessor is inserted correctly, CPU is not.Other cards seem to be for some sort of test equipment.

author: David Hess
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 17, 2017, 02:46:19 pm
content: The first ones look likeSTD (Simple to Design) Bus.

author: rrinker
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 18, 2017, 03:16:52 am
content: Quote from: David Hess on December 17, 2017, 02:46:19 pmLooking at how power comes in to the first two - I agree, STD bus for sure. The one with the power brick is indeed being fed from the AUX -12 and AUX GND, and the other one has a cap right across +5 and GND right at the card edge.

author: madsbarnkob
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: December 18, 2017, 07:57:09 am
content: Pictures in first post is clearly from a industrial controller, properly ancestor of the PLC, as the STD bus also suggests. But I can not help with more than that.

author: Halcyon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: December 18, 2017, 09:04:37 am
content: I would have guessed that the PCA-6136 board is an old "blade" computer for an industrial system.

author: Malvineous
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: January 01, 2018, 08:14:37 am
content: PCA-6136 is a PICMG CPU card. Advantech are are well known manufacturer in this area. PICMG industrial computers take everything off the motherboard except for the ISA/PCI slots and put it all on a card, the idea being you can replace that card to upgrade the machine (or fix a failed CPU), while leaving the rest of the cards in the system untouched (as opposed to having to remove every last part to replace a normal motherboard.)You can't plug PICMG CPU cards into normal motherboards because you'll end up with two devices trying to run the same ISA bus so neither will work. Some cards can be powered via one of the connectors, but in your case it looks like there's no video card onboard so you won't get much out of powering it up - you'll likely need a backplane and ISA video card at the minimum to try it out.You can find PICMG backplanes on eBay - they look like motherboards except they have no circuitry and often many more slots than normal - or if you don't want to use it, sell it on eBay to a retro PC enthusiast who will use it to play old DOS games.

author: Sjokolade
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: January 08, 2018, 03:54:19 pm
content: Thanks for the information on PICMG - I was actually looking to buy a complete pc with isa slot to test this card.I'll try to sell the cpu board as I see no reason to keep it now, the rest of the cards I see no use for either.

author: rrinker
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 08, 2018, 07:21:47 pm
content: It is interesting (maybe) to note that my first MS-DOS computer was built along similar lines. There was just a plain ISA backplane, no actives, and the CPU was on one card and the IO was on a second. It was a Heath/Zenith Z-158, which was an 8MHz XT clone-ish sort of machine (the backplane design being a very obvious difference). The was a button on back that would throttle down to 4.77MHz so games wouldn't run too fast.

author: james_s
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 10, 2018, 06:22:13 am
content: I remember some HP and other brands of PCs that were modular with the CPU on the card technically allowing you to upgrade it later. Unfortunately the proprietary nature invariably resulted in the upgrade card costing nearly as much as a whole new PC, certainly more than an entire clone motherboard and once you upgraded that everything else was still obsolete. Those were the days.

author: rrinker
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 10, 2018, 02:29:13 pm
content: There wasn't a whole lot of point to upgrading this thing, since no matter what, all you has was an original ISA bus. I did swap the 8088 for a NEC V20 which was a noticeable update, and I added an 8087 math coprocessor - one of the few thing I had that took advantage of it is this Star Trek game called Begin, where you issued commands for a fleet of ships and attacked a fleet of whichever enemy you picked. Lots and lots of angle calculations as some of the larger ship types could launch a LOT of torpedos - and each torpedo could be independently targeted! If you picked the maximum size fleets for both sides, it crawled - but with the 8087 it was incredible. Of course run it in a DOS window on a modern machine and you wonder why it would be so slow back then.There was for a time a company that made 80286 upgrades for 8088 PCs - the card plugged in to a slot and connected to the 8088 socked with a 40 pin ribbon cable. As you might expect - it failed horribly. Very unreliable, and prone to lockups - and that's AFTER I added a grounded shield to the ribbon cable. And it didn't give true AT performance anyway - you still used the 8 bit memory and ISA bus.