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A New Parallax driven S-100 Console-IO Board

M

monahan_z

Experienced Member
Joined
Oct 19, 2008
Messages
263
Location
San Ramon, CA
Andrew and I have now finished our Propeller driven S-100 Console-IO board. This board allows you to utilize a standard IBM-PC keyboard for Console input and outputs a standard VGA signal (e.g. for a modern LCD display). There are a number of port and status bit jumpers that should allow the board to be transparently spliced into most old S-100 systems without any software changes.

While the hardware for the board is done, there is ample room for a good Propeller "Spin" programmer to improve upon the software to increase the boards current 80X24 resolution.

Please see here for more information:-
http://s100computers.com/My System Pages/Console IO Board/Console IO Board.htm

Enjoy
 
Hi! Thanks John! The S-100 Console IO boards were a big hit and there was a lot of builders waiting for them as soon as they arrived. It also means all the PCBs were gone almost immediately. When enough builder sign up on the waiting list to warrant another PCB order, I will get some more boards and distribute.

Thanks and have a nice day!

Andrew Lynch
 
Hey all !

I have this board 90% done with what I had for spares, and the
rest will have to come from Jameco.

I have a few questions;

What is the value of the XTAL ? Not mentioned in the
text, but I saw 5.00 on the PCB image from the web site.

U46 & U47

On the first brd.pdf layout;

U46 is a 74LS374 and is above U47
U47 is a 74LS373 and is below U46

On the final brd.pdf layout;

U47 is a 74LS373 and is above U46
U46 is a 74LS374 and is below U47

The physical location is switched, so am I to
assume that both U46 & U47 are 74LS374's ?

I am very excited about this project !

Todd
 
Nice board! Well done!

Another idea: how hard would it be to to design a "reverse" console thing?
Background: real computers have the option to use a serial console or some other means to make the console remote (ILO boards etc) which is fine. However, the common x86-architecture "PC" only have keyboard in (ps/2) and display out (vga), and no option to use a remote console.
The cool thing would be to have a "gizmo" connected to keyboard, vga (and optionally, mouse) on a "PC", and the connected to another machine (via usb or serial?) so that you could use a program on said machine as it were the console on the "PC". Crazy idea, or possible?
 
monahan_z said:
Yes 5MHz for crystal and both U46 & U47 are (now) 74LS374's. Also R68 should be 100K not 1K.
Click to expand...

Hi! Thanks John! I've made the changes to the schematic, parts list, and PCB layout.

These changes have no effect on construction, test, and usage of the board except for the renamed parts.

No modifications to the PCB are necessary.

Thanks and have a nice day!

Andrew Lynch
 
Tingo I must be slow, I'm afraid I don't quite understand what you are trying to do/setup. Could you explain in a bit more detail
John
 
They do make KVM's that will work over a network. This would allow a remote Ethernet connection. Not exactly what you're looking for, but at least you can watch the server boot, change bios settings, etc.
 
Yes, like tomasont says; basically a network (or usb) connected kvm for one machine. (Why don't I simply buy a network enabled KVM then? Because the ones I have found are big and expensive)
Use case: I have several x86 machines running as servers. Normally they are connected only to power and ethernet. If something fails and I need to interact with the console of one of those I have to drag a monitor and a keyboard over to where the machine sits - often very inconvenient. If I could just plug in a usb cable (from that gadget I dreamed up) to my laptop and run a program and have the console on that, it would be much easier.

I hope this gives a better idea of what I want and why?
 
What you want is never going to happen in a package that is 'little and inexpensive'. And there's almost zero demand for it. Sorry.
 
This belongs in a thread of its own, I think.

It seems to me that what Tingo suggests would need any target machine to have a BIOS able to boot from USB. The imaginary device plugged into USB would first have to emulate a boot disk (maybe a version of one of the many Linux-based rescue disks in the public domain) that set up the target machine to recognise USB "KVM" on the laptop. The last part would take pretty complicated software to export BIOS VGA through USB.

If you could use on the target 2 x USB ports (or 1 x USB + 1 x serial) you could have the USB boot device set up a modified serial comms console session on the target, listening to the "remote" console via the second, non-boot port. But to do that, the target machine has to have almost all of its hardware up and running. You might need a USB-to-serial adaptor but no video or KVM adaptors would be needed.

In that approach, you would not be running the host's native system, but could look at its files from the "guest".

If all your servers were configured to run normally as virtual machines (say in VirtualBox), then you could also launch and test those virtual machine server systems from the temporary OS environment set up by your USB-boot device.

Not simple, really

Rick
 
tingo said:
Yes, like tomasont says; basically a network (or usb) connected kvm for one machine. (Why don't I simply buy a network enabled KVM then? Because the ones I have found are big and expensive)
Click to expand...

It is of course off-topic for this thread, which is about a terminal card for an S-100 computer, but...

What is "big" and "expensive"? Those are relative terms. A Lantronix Securelinx Spider:

http://www.lantronix.com/it-management/kvm-over-ip/securelinx-spider.html

runs about $260, which is incredibly cheap for a network KVM. Capturing a VGA or better resolution framebuffer isn't trivial, (I think it'd be over the Propeller's head without a fair amount of external hardware aid) thus I sort of doubt it'd be much cheaper to duplicate at the hobbyist level than the commercial product costs.

If you're dealing with servers oldschool enough to have ISA cards for video I imagine you could probably use a Propeller as the heart of a card which would emulate an IBM MDA text adapter and have a jumper running to the keyboard port, ala the old PC Weasel 2000. A PCI/VGA version might be harder.
 
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