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| Reverse engineering laser engraver to work out interface protocol |
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| CambridgeMart:
So the problem appears to be the cable length between the PC/104 bus and the IDE bus; chopping the cable down to a much shorter length has got things working and I can now get to the DOS prompt. Next job is to work out how to copy the files off the board so that I can do some analysis; sadly there's no FDD controller, so I'll try again with theIDE port. |
| CambridgeMart:
Well the IDE port idea doesn't work, I've tried numerous HDDs and various configurations and it either fails with 'Fixed disk controller error' or if it gets past this point, it fails with operating system not found, diskette error. When it boots normally, i.e. without an HDD connected, the C: drive is ~ 1.5MB which is probably the Datalight flash device on board. Clearly connecting an external IDE drive is messing with the onboard storage, I just can't work out why. Edit: translating the manual and reading it carefully, I realised I had to disable the C800 extension to get an external HDD to work, it's so long since I had to deal with that! It turns out I can get the board to recognise and boot from a disk, but only if it's set to be the only disk (solo setting); I cannot get the board to recognise both the onboard Datalight device and an external HDD. I do have an old ISA soundcard fitted with an IDE header, I'll try that next and see if it configures as a secondary IDE controller. |
| CambridgeMart:
After much playing around, I found that if a bootable HDD was connected to the PC104 card, the card would boot from the HDD, but it is not possible to boot from flash when an HDD is connected. |
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