A thought...

Darrell Norquay dnorquay at awinc.com
Wed Oct 2 03:12:33 GMT 1996


At 11:42 PM 10/1/96 +0200, Kalle Pihlajasaari wrote:


>If you use the PC104 formfactor the connectors are 0.1" pin grids which
>are very reliable (not perfect mind you) and loads better than the 
>ISA edge connector.  The PC104 designs also gave a full set of standard
>periferals on the card to give you a diagnostics RX232 port (2 of) a
>parallel port for one interrupt in line and 4 data in lines and 
>11 data data out lines.  You also get drop in ROM, FLASH, SRAM
>cards that are available in automotive temperatures.  Many vehicle
>tracking systems make use of embedded PCs in cars and trucks.
>
>The sixe of PC104 is about 3.5" x 3.5" and as such smaller than the
>standard car controller (still needs driver circuitry which will make up
>for it).  Also if you find the 386 just does not get you there drop in a 
>486 or pentium, YOUR CODE STAYS THE SAME (or almost, depending on
>coding style and ability) and the rest of the hardware does not need
>to be changed just the processor card.

The main problem with PC104 is the cost.  Other than that, it's an ideal
platform.  To give you some examples, I am working on a data aquisition
system which uses a pc104 computer stack.  Here are the (somewhat shocking)
prices:

CPU - 486DX2 (no ports, no RAM) -                              US$1100.00 
Analog / Digital I/O board (8 analog, 12 bit, 16 digital)-      US$560.00
Viper PCMCIA hard drive -  with pc104 adapter board             US$500.00
(nifty little unit, BTW, shock rating 100G's operating, 
750G's non operating, 350Mbytes)
Power supply - Tri M systems vehicle power supply -             US$210.00
Serial port card, 2-RS232, 2-RS485 -                            $US310.00
                                                                ---------
                                                               US$2680.00

For a DX2?!?!?!  But, this is the price you have to pay for an industrial CPU.
We also use passive backplane systems, which have the CPU on a plug in card.
We pay nearly $1200.00 for a plain vanilla equivalent of a standard 486
motherboard that you can buy as a consumer product for $200.00.  Mind you,
they do have industrial temp specs, but they are just not produced in the
million quantities that consumer PC's are, hence the exhorbitant cost.

regards
dn
dnorquay at awinc.com




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