Using GPIO Pins

[RobDog888]

Has anyone had any experience with using General Purpose Input Output pins on boards (mother or otherwise)?

Any good links or ideas where to start?

Havent been finding much about them.

Thanks

[RobDog888]

Looks like I may have to write a driver in VC++ 6.0 just to interface with them

[dilettante]

I haven't seen these except on a few x86 embedded boards. Until NT 6.2 ("Windows 8") I don't think Microsoft even offered any driver development support beyond Win CE.

[RobDog888]

I found a bunch of new leads last night. Seems there is a .NET Micro Framework targeted towards embedded devices.

http://www.netduino.com/

The project is to design our own 3rd party board running Windows CE. However for the proof of concept we are using various research boards and thats where I found GPIO pins and they are exactly what we need to have on our board to interface with. Adding other legacy ports like the parallel and serial ports wont suffice as we need two way and several pins of communications. The parallel port was close but other than shotgunning two parallel ports and cables to provide all the traffic its kludgy and costly.

[RobDog888]

Oh and using the USB ports would be ideal but then they are not actual ports but bus interfaces which would require a custom driver to communicate with our board. Its a big headache and investment of time/money to get one developed. So for the short term and proof of concept we are keeping it simple as possible.

[Lord Orwell]

well you could simply use a raspberry pi as a starter. it's got io on it. I can't say what OS support from windows is on it though. I know it runs linux out of the box. I mention this one because you develop software for it in c++ and the drivers for all IO, etc are already done for you. For an embedded device you may consider getting away from windows.








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[Lord Orwell]

well you could simply use a raspberry pi as a starter. it's got io on it. I can't say what OS support from windows is on it though. I know it runs linux out of the box. I mention this one because you develop software for it in c++ and the drivers for all IO, etc are already done for you. For an embedded device you may consider getting away from windows.








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[dilettante]

The project is to design our own 3rd party board running Windows CE.

Do you mean "design the board" or "design something using a board" running CE?

If CE is required stuff like the underpowered Raspberry Pi or more powerful Android boards wouldn't fit the bill. A Netduino is also frighteningly underpowered, but if you don't have to do much crunching or handle a lot of local data that may be your answer.

[RobDog888]

Well the first phase if proof of concept so a inexpensive pre-made board is what we will use. Then after we will have a small board developed.
I have a Advantech 4373 and a Phidgets board. The Advantech board is the most robust

The reason why we are doing this is to create an interface between an old ISA socket custom plug on one computer and have that connect to another computer via a USB basically

So a board or maybe even custom cabling with custom driver would do the trick

[RobDog888]

Still need to figure this out but putting it on the backburner and switching over to our other board - http://www.phidgets.com/products.php...duct_id=1018_2

[dilettante]

Sounds confusing.

What I'm getting is that you need to provide some way to connect an ISA card (or cards) to a legagy-free PC via USB.

If so I'm not sure any of the boards discussed will be of much help, and you'd be far ahead using some embedded board that still offers an ISA slot. Then you'd need to write software for this "adapter box" to talk to the USB bus as well as software for the target PC (a driver to talk to USB and an API DLL to bridge between the driver and the final application program).

Those microcontroller boards with GPIO pins on them might be usable, but you'd need to know a lot about specifics of the expected ISA cards. These probably get power in various voltages and various clocks off the ISA connector as well as having I/O pins there. Sounds like a lot of research would be required compared to a real PC with a real ISA slot plus appropriate drivers for the ISA card.


Of course the point of the exercise may be to avoid using relatively expensive small industrial x86 boards that still offer an ISA slot to build an adapter box to bridge over USB to a legacy-free PC.

Or maybe I'm far off in the weeds.

[RobDog888]

We already have the ISA socket solved and just need to get it from our intermediatary board to the USB.
Working on the Phidgets board in the morning. Looks very promissing

[RobDog888]

Got the Phidgets board working and interfacing but since it only a "test" board it doesnt have a traditional plugin interface on the board for our use. It does connect nicely up to the computer with USB

[RobDog888]

Been working with another test board, the Netduino 2. It has alot of C# code support to make interfacing easy but its not really powerful enough to run the size of app we are writting.
Had a glitch with the Advantech board so its out for warrenty repair. When its back Im sure it will be our go to board for the solution as its basically a mini computer board.