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<== Date ==> <== Thread ==>

Subject: Re: Serial Ports on MVME167 Card
From: [email protected] (Tim Mooney)
To: [email protected], [email protected]
Date: Thu, 5 Jun 1997 02:16:50 -0500
> From [email protected] Wed Jun  4 18:22 CDT 1997
>...
> Is there any fundamental reason why we don't use the serial ports on the
> MVME167 Card in
> Epics?
> 
> We have successfully used them to control SR570 current amplifiers.   It
> requires a small
> patch to vxWorks to add an ioctl call to change the number of stop
> bits.   If you have fewer
> than three serial devices interfaced per IOC (as we have) this allows
> you to dispense with
> the MVME162 card and IP modules etc.

I'm not aware of any fundamental reason, but there are some practical
ones, mainly involving worries about per-character interrupts on the
processor running EPICS, and about what to do when you need more
ports.  But I think the best reason is the MVME162-532, which is
cheaper than the MVME167, has 16 MB of memory, is faster, and has four
IP ports, but only has one spare serial port.  (With an octal-serial IP,
this combination is still cheaper than an MVME167.)  We (actually Dan
Legnini) started looking at this card when most of our beamlines ran
into memory problems with the 8MB MVME167.

One of the last things Jim Kowalkowski did before he left was to fix
problems that had prevented us from running Hideos serial support under
VxWorks (so we can run EPICS and Hideos on the same processor).  I've
been running Hideos and EPICS on an MVME162-532 for about a month
without any problems.  I haven't really stress tested the system, but I
have run all four IP modules (RS323, GPIB, DAC, and RS485) along with
20 motors, a scaler card, the Canberra MCA, and a separate MVME162-02
running only Hideos with the same four IP modules.

Tim Mooney

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