[rescue] Sun SLC/ELC

[Jochen Kunz]

On 2003.01.14 17:12 Kurt Huhn wrote:

> > I mounted a ELC board in an external SCSI enclosure together
> > with a disk, CDROM and CDRecorder. Makes a perfect toaster with
> > NetBSD.
> Oooh!  Details?  Pics?  How-to?
No (digi-)cam - no pics. There is already a How-to at:
http://www.sunhelp.org/~mouse/

You should get the steel plate at the back that holds the main PCB and
the PCB that breaks the edge connector out to the varios connectors at
the back of the machine. Get the speaker if you want some audio, as it
has a unusual impedance (50 Ohm?).

I mounted this plate in the top of the SCSI box above the drive bays,
pluged small extension cables for AUI and serial into the connecors. The
extension cables are hanging out of the back of the box. I was to lazzy
to mount them proper. ;-)
I soldered a short ribbon cable to the SCSI connector (PCB side) as I
had no space for the SubD 50 HD plug. Soldering the 50 wires to the SubD
50 HD connector can be a bit unpleasent when you aren't used to
soldering work as the pins are dense. These wires are soldered to a IDC
50 connector where the SCSI cable is pluged in. The SCSI cable goes down
to the CDROM, CDR, disk and to a connector at the back. So it is easy to
connect additional devices like tapes or MO drives. This way the box is
handy to transfer tape images from tape to CDR and vice versa.

The tricky part is the power. The ELC needs +5 V at around 2 A, +12 V /
-12 V at some mA. There is no -12 V in a SCSI box, but you need -12 V
for the serial console. So I made a litle adapter on a universal raster
PCB where a regular disk drive power plug can be pluged in and that
carries a simple voltage inverter:
http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz/tmp/inverter.pdf
This inverter generates -10 V out of +12 V, enough for the RS232.

I used this inverter at an other project too: A Sun 4/600MP board in a
3/60 case. The 3/60 PSU has no -12 V that the 4/600MP board needs for
the serial console. But I would not recommend to run a 4/600MP board in
a 3/60 case. It gets _very_ hot due to the poor ventilation of the 3/60
case.
--



tsch|_,
         Jochen

Homepage: http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz/