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| Reverse engineering laser engraver to work out interface protocol |
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| CambridgeMart:
I recently scored a nice Technifor Lasertop 410 laser engraver system; not quite as cheap as one of Dave's dumpster finds, but not far off it! The unit is complete except for the PC that runs the software; I'm advised it recently had a new pump laser installed (confirmed), but the system went wrong and it was considered too expensive to bother repairing it. There's very little technical documentation available, and the UK agent refuses to help with 2nd user equipment (so much for recycling and reuse!). What I do know is the interface to the PC is RS-232 and is at 19200 Baud, no indication of stop bits or parity though. Having torn it apart, the controller is based on a PC/104 SBC plus a laser interface card, a scanner driver and power supply board, and an optically isolated interface board. The SBC is an Erim ALICPU6117-104 with the ALI 6117 processor; it has 2 RS232 ports and an RS485 port, a couple of parallel interfaces (listed as being suitable for a graphics LCD panel and a 56 key keyboard), and an IDE interface. Sadly the Wayback machine doesn't have the data sheet for the SBC archived and I can't locate a copy anywhere. I've looked at the 2 serial ports at startup and they both put out a few characters at bootup and feeding a data stream in to one of them does halt the boot process, so it is configured to generate an interrupt on received data. I cannot get any other repsonse from either serial port. I'm now thinking that it may be worth trying to boot the SBC from an IDE drive into a basic Linux with a TTY on one of the serial ports, then reading the filesystem from the flash storage. Does this seem like a reasonable approach? |
| xyrtek:
Can you post some pics of the controller, card etc? Have you looked at the storage on the SBC? OS? Binaries? (sometimes even source code and test routines/scripts) PC-104 is good old IBM PC/AT ISA bus and should represent no challenge for a motivated hobbyist. You certainly have options to hack that puppy quick. |
| CambridgeMart:
Images of the top and bottom sides of the SBC board complete with annotations. |
| dcarr:
I think the linux idea is a good one. If you can boot up off external IDE hopefully you'll be able to mount and read out the onboard flash. Just need to make sure you choose a distro that will be happy inside your limited RAM. If my read of the datasheet is correct, it has 32MByte. |
| CambridgeMart:
Having found the X_Linux distribution specifically written for the 6117 processor, I've configured an old IDE drive with the OS on it and hooked it up to the IDE interface. Unfortunately it still boots off the internal flash device which implies the BIOS isn't set to boot from IDE. Not sure how to get past this hurdle, so I guess this idea is a dead end; lacking the data for the SBC, I can't work out how to access the BIOS without a display! I guess I'll need to remove the flash and mount it in a Linux system as a drive, but I'm lacking the tools needed for reading a parallel interface flash device unfortunately. |
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