Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

"Stephen A. Wood" <[email protected]> · Thu, 01 Aug 96 10:38:38 -0400

I am looking for advice/suggestions from anyone who has experience with
MVME 162-5xx boards using the Industry pack slots.

We have recently purchased a MVME 162-532A with 16 MB in order to upgrade
the memory and performance of an existing IOC.  This board differs from
the 162's that I have used in the following ways.
	1.  32 MhZ instead of 25 MhZ
	2.  68040 chip instead of 68040LC
	3.  New IP (industry pack) driver chip with optional faster bus speed.

We have problems with the board that I believe center around the new IP
chip.  The IP bus does not reset automatically on VME reset.  It must be
done in hardware.  We believe that we have done that correctly.  The board
can be rebooted successfully with the reset button or reboot command.  (Before
we found the right way to do the reset, we had to power off the board in
order to get it rebooted.)

We have built our epics system for this board (using mv167 binaries) and it
works except for flakey problems on industry packs plugged into the 162fx.

Our 162 has 3 green spring industry packs on it.  IP OCTAL (RS232) cards in
slots A and B, and a double width ADIO (Analog, digital IO) card in slots
C and D.

The most apparant problem occurs with the ADIO card.  We read an analog value
from this card by writing to an "execute" register, waiting 200 microseconds
and then reading it back.  This works wonderfully on a classic 162.  On the
new 162, reading this register back often (not always) results in an
"Access Violation"  (NOT a Bus error).  However, if I insert a vxMemProbe
before the read back, the read back always works.  However, some adc
channels are noisier.  (This is exactly the same ADIO card that works fine
in a classic 162)

On the serial ports, they seem to basically work.  However, on some of our
serial devices, we need to raise and lower the RTS line constantly, which
means that we are accessing the CR and MR registers of the Greenspring
IPOCTAL RS232 card.  Most serial devices seem to work ok, but the serial
devices that require this RTS mucking about work randomly.
Also, after many minutes of running, we will start to
see Access violations on the MR registers of various ports.

Any advice?  I am tempted to just trade these boards in for classic 162's, but
presumably the older models will be phased out in favor of the 5xx series, so
it would be good to know how to make them work.

						Steve Wood

---------------------------------------------------------
Stephen A. Wood				       CEBAF/SURA
Internet: [email protected]                            MS 12H
                                   12000 Jefferson Avenue
Phone: (757)249-7367               Newport News, VA 23606
FAX:   (757)249-5800
Pager: (757)680-7367            Office: CEBAF Center C121

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System