Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Tony Cox - (415)926-3105 <[email protected]> · Tue, 03 Oct 1995 15:00:33 PST

John says:-

>FYI --
>
>Irvine Miler at Hurikon just called me to followup on a loaner I had from
>them a while back.  No as far as I know, the APS is not interested in
>buying any, but he did mention that the EPICS community is something known
>to them and that they have some kind of discount available.  Here are the
>prices he quoted me on the phone:
>
>Nitro 68060 running at 50mHz qty 1:
>16MB RAM    $5391
>8MB RAM     $4561
>
>Irvine Miler can be contacted at 800-356-9602 or [email protected].
>
>
>Before buying, you might want to post here to ask if anyone has been able
>to get your I/O boards running with the Nitro60.  I know that an EPICS
>soft-only database works fine, but have no data on known good (or bad) I/O
>boards with it.  I suspect that the usual suspects (Jorger, NI1014,
>DVX2502, VXI and HiDEOS slave boards) will not work out of the box. 
>
>
>--John

I'm evaluating the Nitro60 now. There is a minor price advantage, and a major
one in that I don't need to have a MVME 712/M transition module in the VME
crate taking up slots (the serial highway and the EtherNet come out on
p2 directly). The '60 is also somewhat faster, although I havn't benchmarked
it.

There _is_ a problem with the boot rom as shipped - it appears that it will
not allow a boot without sysFail being false. The XyCom 556 falls over this -
probably others too as John says. Some modifications to the BSP will probably
be necessary also, since the sysinit routines also seem to hang looking for
sysFail to disappear. Like John, I have managed to get the system booted
without any IO boards in place, using their default VxWorks image (I havn't
yet rebuilt it from the BSP).

Heurikon have shipped me (yesterday) a modified boot rom, but will be next
week before I have a chance to test it out.

They do seem very keen to work with me (hoping, no doubt, to get a handle into
the growing EPICS market), and I have had excellent response from their 
technical folks. That said, I havn't yet managed to get it to boot, so stay
tuned.....

rgds
Tony

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr Anthony D Cox
Computer Systems Specialist
Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
MS 69, Box 4349
Stanford CA 94305
[email protected]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System