Subject: Re: Shark Universal Module Interface (UMI) PCI slot
To: Erik E. Fair <fair@clock.org>
From: Mark Hayter <hayter@pa.dec.com>
List: port-arm32
Date: 09/25/1998 10:15:34
I am not aware of anyone making UMI cards for the shark. There have
been a couple of reports of small volume (hobby or research lab) cards.
We had a messy (wire wrap!!!) adapter between the PCI UMI and a regular
PCI slot for testing, but as far as I know nobody ever made a reasonable
one.
The idea behind the UMIs was that they were for manufacturing time
customisation (for example selecting between a ISDN and xDSL modem based
on demand). So they are really cheep, very few insert/remove cycle connectors.
There was never the intention to do a riser card to a "real" slot. But
don't let this stop you :-)
If you are making a board to plug in to the UMI slots and want it to line
up with the back panel holes you should use the connectors described in
http://www.research.digital.com:80/SRC/iag/info/dnaext/dnard/info/pciumi.html
All the mechanical info should be in the mecanical section of the site.
Of course, I use the UMI area to mount my 2.5" hard drive so can't plug
anything in there anyway.
On the subject of strange connectors people might like to play with I
should remind people of the (never tested, never used) VGA feature connector
that sits in the top right corner of the board. In theory you can connect
one of the Philips video capture chips (eg SAA 7111) here and video can
be fed into the video memory and merged/scaled onto the screen (or read
back by the processor). I think YUV capture works in case you want to
compress. I got a non-working board from IGS made as in their "connect
a phillips chip to the 2000/2010 app note) and the mechanicals work out
so that if you put SMATEC DW-13-12-S-D-750 and SAMTEC DW-07-12-S-D-750
headers in the shark board the s-video connector on the capture board
sits nicely just above the shark s-video out. (If you just want simple
video a quickcam in the parallel port is probably a better idea, but if
you want a bigger project this is one idea).
Mark
[These are personal views only]