EEVblog #1028 - What's All This PC/104 Stuff Anyhow?

[foreverska]

Saw that... except it isn't PC104.
None of the connections or stack ability....

just the dimensions?

Well that's pretty silly if they go to all that trouble but don't actually do it right!

Hey guys!  Project creator here.  I've gone back and forth on the whole PC/104 thing being front and center in our media.  PC/104 refers to a whole family of standards including, PC/104 (ISA, like you're referring to), PCI/104 and PCIE/104.  It is pretty confusing at first pass.
We chose to implement a subset of the PCIE/104 standard called the OneBank connector.  It's a lot cheaper and doesn't have a bunch of pins we wouldn't use (since the broadcom chip doesn't have PCI or PCIE). But that means we are indeed stackable.  I have a cellular modem in my personal stack.
There's even rumors of USB to ISA to maybe support classic PC/104 cards but I wrote more about that on my campaign page which went live today.

It's very good to see discussion like this.  I will have to make it a priority to include media showing the stack-ability.

[Brumby]

It's very good to see discussion like this.

It is.

Even better is to have the engagement of the designer!

I will have to make it a priority to include media showing the stack-ability.

Very good!


Having a two-way interaction is going to make everybody's experience that much better.

As a designer, you can be too close to the subject matter and be intimately familiar with so many details about the project that you don't communicate all the good points.

As potential users, we don't get to see the hundreds of little minutiae that have been laboured over in the development and we will each be looking for a range of features and/or specifications.

The EEVblog forum offers the opportunity for both sides to meet, discuss, explore...   

[alpher]

Forget Arduino & Raspberry Pi being the embedded platform computing standards, PC/104 has reigned supreme for over 25 years and is still THE industrial embedded computing standard.
Dave boots up a 17 year old 80386SX PC-104 board with Disk On Chip flash drive. Well, after a lot of frustration anyway.

Fascinaating 
Sorry to rehash  old thread, but I have one question.
Would you mind sharing the source for the VGA card that you used here?
I cannot find any available for sale for reasonable amount.
Main boards are no problem, I've scored a couple but no VGA in sight.
Thank you.

[PixieDust]

Unless I'm missing something, these 'industrial' computers can only really compete with the arduino in terms of performance. The RPi blows it out of the water in terms of compute power. So I guess if you want to replace the RPi, you can't with these things. Interesting video none the less! Thanks Dave!

[Barny]

What you've seen in the video is a ca. 20 year old iPC. (The i used to stand for industrie before the bitten apple stated its marketing hype.)
Its obvious that this modules arn't the fastest PC's on the marked.

Modern iPC's and PC/104 have similar power of the whole range of modern laptops.

[PixieDust]

Yep understood, just pointing out that despite these things being standardised and quite nifty, they are none the less quite outdated technology in coparison to the 'non serious' Raspberry Pi. I don't know how long RPi will be around for, but for the moment, it's a nifty useful device.

[Fungus]

Unless I'm missing something, these 'industrial' computers can only really compete with the arduino in terms of performance. The RPi blows it out of the water in terms of compute power.

Who cares about that? Most industrial tasks are quite menial, eg. Read a sensor, activate a motor until it reaches the end-stop.

[PixieDust]

Ah fair enough.