AlphaStation 500 Pinouts (PSU, front panel, etc.)
ian_p...@yahoo.com
AlphaStation 500. I should have enough parts to get the board to work,
but I don't have the power supply. From what I can tell, the board
needs four voltages - +5v, +3.3, +12 and -12, along with ground. The
connectors on the board are labelled to some extent, but not terribly
clearly. It looks like the 24 pin connector is +5v, the 20 pin
connector is +3.3, and the 8 pin connector has ground, +12 and -12 in
it. Also, logically, there needs to be more ground in there somewhere,
and I would imagine that the +5v and +3.3v connectors are half ground
pins. Unfortunately, I don't know _for_sure_ what the pinouts of the
connectors are, and I don't want to go smoking the board getting +5 and
ground swapped around. I've managed to find the technical manual on the
AlphaStation 200/400, and the AlphaStation 600, but not the 500. I also
haven't been able to find the pinout of the front panel connector for
the 500. The one for the 400 has a different number of pins, so it
won't be the same.
Also, I did find the pinout of the Media Adapter Unit AUI port in the
200/400 technical manual. I would assume here that it's going to be the
same on the 500, since the connector has the same number of pins on
both machines. The signal descriptions for the connector aren't the
greatest though, but I've managed to match up what I think should work
for attaching this connector to an AUI tranciever, although I'm not
100% certain. At least that shouldn't blow anything up if it doesn't
work.
So, anyway, if anyone has any information on the connectors of the
AlphaStation 500 board, or better yet, the technical manual for the
Alphastation 500, I would very much appreciate it. Hopefully I can
ressurect this machine.
-Ian
ian_p...@yahoo.com
by using a multimeter and a little logic, and I built a new wiring
harness to go between the AlphaStation board and an ATX power supply.
Lo and behold, it worked on the first try. The machine came to life and
I got the SRM console prompt. Unfortunately, I have hit another
stumbling block - the SRM console is secured with a password, and I
haven't been able to figure out how to clear it yet. The users's manual
doesn't seem to have any information on resetting the password, and I
haven't turned up much useful information on the 'net either. I did
find some mention of using the Halt switch to bypass it, but there I
have another problem - I have no idea where the pin for the Halt switch
is, since I don't have any of the original case wiring, just the board.
Any suggestions?
-Ian
Alan Walpool
Try removing the battery.
Good luck
>>>>> "ian" == ian primus@yahoo com <ian_p...@yahoo.com> writes:
ian> OK, as an update, I managed to figure out the power connector
ian> pinouts by using a multimeter and a little logic, and I built a
ian> new wiring harness to go between the AlphaStation board and an
ian> ATX power supply. Lo and behold, it worked on the first try. The
ian> machine came to life and I got the SRM console prompt.
ian> Unfortunately, I have hit another stumbling block - the SRM
ian> console is secured with a password, and I haven't been able to
ian> figure out how to clear it yet. The users's manual doesn't seem
ian> to have any information on resetting the password, and I haven't
ian> turned up much useful information on the 'net either. I did find
ian> some mention of using the Halt switch to bypass it, but there I
ian> have another problem - I have no idea where the pin for the Halt
ian> switch is, since I don't have any of the original case wiring,
ian> just the board. Any suggestions?
ian> -Ian
ian_p...@yahoo.com
Alan Walpool wrote:
> Try removing the battery.
>
> Good luck
That was my first thought too. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to have
a seperate backup battery. On the logic board, there are two sealed
modules soldered to the board. One is a Dallas realtime clock module,
and the other is an ST battery backed SRAM chip. Both are the type that
employs a lithium-ion battery sealed into an epoxy block along with the
chip. And, since they're soldered directly to the board, there's really
no easy way to remove them, so I can't do the thing I normally do on
pasword protected SparcStations, booting the machine without the NVRAM
chip, then reinserting the chip while in the monitor, and saving the
parameters again.
There _has_ to be a way to do this without massive board reworking...
BTW - I'm still hunting for a technical manual on this beastie.
Thanks!
-Ian
John Beardmore
"ian_p...@yahoo.com" <ian_p...@yahoo.com> writes
>BTW - I'm still hunting for a technical manual on this beastie.
>Thanks!
If you notice anywhere that has a tech ref for the 2100 Server 4/200,
can you let me know please ?
Cheers, J/.
--
John Beardmore
ian_p...@yahoo.com
have successfully cleared the password out of the AlphaStation 500.
Here's what I did:
I looked up the data sheet on the NVRAM module the board uses, and it
lists the chip enable pin as pin 20. So, I soldered a length of thin
wire-wrap wire to the chip enable pin on the bottom of the board, and
soldered the other end to a resistor (I used a 147 ohm resistor, other
values should work, as long as it's not too high, this just happened to
be one I found on the bench when I needed a resistor...). I then stuck
the other end of the resistor down into the molex power connector for
the +5v power input, so I'm now tying the chip enable pin of the NVRAM
module high (it's active low). When I turned on the computer, It booted
into the SRM console, and then gave me an 'invalid mode' error, and
stopped at 'fixing nv0 block'. I pulled the resistor out of the power
connector, and the machine continued on, dumping me into an SRM prompt,
with no secure mode! So, I ran "set password" and set the password to
something simple (it has to be more than 15 charachters long though, I
used 'alphastationpassword'). Once that was done, I turned off the
computer, and turned it back on (leaving the resistor disconnected) and
then was able to log into the secure mode using my new password. Once
in secure mode this way, I could run 'clear password' and get rid of
the password entirely.
I did try running 'clear password' first, when I got into the secure
mode with the resistor, but for some reason, that won't clear out the
password on the next boot - I had to actually set the password to
something and then reboot and _then_ clear it. This probably has
something to do with forcing the machine to overwrite the value with
something different, since it does think that there is no password
(and, for that matter, no configuration data...) when it's booted with
the chip enable line tied high.
I don't know if this type of a kludge will work with other hardware,
this is the only AlphaStation I've ever played with, this is all new
territory to me :) I'm sure there's a _better_ way to do this, but hey,
this worked. If you don't understand my ramblings here, don't worry,
I'm documenting everything I'm donig here, and I'll post pictures and
information on the 'net when I get it all compiled, and post a link
here.
-Ian