ISA PC hardware with your Pi

[LIST, John W.]

Following on from my last post, I've often thought that it would be useful to have an ISA bridge for the current generation of single board computers.

The ISA slot started life as a bus extension of the 8088, 8086 and 80286 processors used in the earliest IBM PCs. It's thus a very simple and very slow (by today's standards) bus architecture. Well within the abilities of an Arduino or a Pi to address through a set of multiplexed i/o port and buffer chips. I'm guessing you could do it with little more than a few up-to-date 74 series logic chips. Or a fairly primitive FPGA perhaps. The challenge would be in a software library, handling ISA bus timings, interrupts etc. not in the hardware.

ISA isn't even a dead technology, it lives on in industrial control PCs. (As does EISA, which is WEIRD!) You can for instance still buy a modern PC on an ISA card designed to be plugged into an ISA backplane and control some nameless piece of industrial kit. It's amusing, seeing new ISA i/o cards at high prices when the same 20-year-old card can be bought on eBay for pennies.

Now why would you want to make an ISA bridge? Two compelling reasons. First for the hobbyist, there is a vast array of useful hardware available on ISA cards. I'm not thinking of workaday cards like IDE controllers or VGA cards here, but the huge number of various specialised i/o cards for all sorts of applications, many of which are now available for pennies as nobody in the wider world wants them anymore. And second for the professional engineer, it opens up a new market for the Pi, Arduino etc. If you have a product that requires a $1000 industrial PC on an ISA card simply because of its adherence to a 30-year-old bus it's a no-brainer to instead use a £30 ARM SBC that can talk to the same hardware.

I'm now far removed from my roots in this kind of stuff so while I would once have reached for logic chip specs and a PCB CAD package I now sit and muse from my position behind a pile of dictionaries. But I can't help thinking there's a product in there somewhere.

JWL


John W. List
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[Achraf M Fahmy]

John,

I'm glad I found someone who had the same idea as I did. I'm thinking of the following, using Pi to interface with an ISA & or PCI card for machine control purpose. The OEM computer used with the machine costs 3000$+ and it's really just a PC104! have you had luck finding helpful resources on this?

thanks.  

[Alex Gibson]

Hi Achraf,

 

This link might help you – a company makes USB-ISA/PCMCIA adapters.  https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=46841

 

Is this a commercial project?  If so I may be able to help through my consultancy.

 

Cheers,

 

Alex Gibson

 

+44 7813 810 765    @alexgibson3d    37 Royal Avenue, Reading RG31 4UR

 

admg consulting

 

·         Project management

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