'' Re: [Open-graphics] A really good immediate use for OGD1: PCI bus analyzer

[Timothy Miller]

On 1/3/07, Daniel Rozsnyó <daniel at rozsnyo.com> wrote:
> Patrick McNamara wrote:
> >>> Another option might be to make a daughter board with the appropriate
> >>> drivers and termination for a simple SCSI bus.  Even a simple SCSI-1
> >>> bus would allow for a full download in less than a minute,
> >>> uncompressed.
> >> Download to what though? Does that readily connect to a SCSI controller
> >> in the debugging workstation? Will that workstation have a SCSI
> >> controller?
> >>
> >> Lourens
> >
> >
> > I don't think it is at all unreasonable to use something like SCSI.  Cheap SCSI cards can be had for $30US and if you really insist on using a laptop, you can find USB to SCSI adapters for around $60US.  Something we need to keep in mind here.  Debugging a PCI interface is not an "average hobbyist" task.  Needing somewhat "specialized" hardware to accomplish it is not unrealistic.
> >
>
> If thinking this way then USB-to-IDE would be cheaper (<$10), enough
> fast (25MB/s +) and probably ATA is also simpler to implement than SCSI.
>
> I'd rather choose IDE, its quite universal - having PATA directly and
> you get also USB / FW / SATA with commercially available converters.

I believe Tim Schmidt had suggested USB to serial that could do like 1
megabit/sec on the serial line.  I'm partial to that solution because
it's by far the simplest.  The USB device is self-contained and
appears like a fully-functional USB device on the USB bus.  Linux has
a driver for this that allows software to configure the bitrate on the
serial line.  The chip is on the order of $7.

The only thing that I don't know how to do (and I'm assuming this is
simple) is that I want to make sure we can identify that this serial
device is the one associated with our board, as opposed to some random
serial device.  This just makes it easier for our tracer software to
figure out which serial device it wants to talk to.


-- 
Timothy Miller
http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~millerti