VOGONS


First post, by AngieAndretti

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I'm building a Turbo XT-compatible PC centered around the Xi 8088 kit and a basic ISA backplane. I'd really like to have an LED on my front panel for BUS activity, but I don't have any ISA slots remaining to plug in a POST card and tap off of that so I'm looking for an easy way to tap a pin or two on the bus directly (via the underside of the backplane) or to make a simple circuit along those lines that drives an LED to flicker when there's BUS activity.

It's for show so I don't care exactly what it's actually monitoring as long as it'll flicker when there's activity on the ISA BUS.
Suggestions please?

Reply 1 of 2, by Sphere478

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Yes there is a project for this one sec

Here check this link

http://www.alexandrugroza.ro/microelectronics … face/index.html

And

www.alexandrugroza.ro/microelectronics/index.html

Sphere's PCB projects.
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Sphere’s socket 5/7 cpu collection.
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SUCCESSFUL K6-2+ to K6-3+ Full Cache Enable Mod
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Tyan S1564S to S1564D single to dual processor conversion (also s1563 and s1562)

Reply 2 of 2, by Horun

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I have an old ISA Diag card called the "Discovery Card" from 1993 that does similar but OP says no more open ISA slots so.....here is my quick take:
You have data lines, address lines, IRQ lines, DMA lines and some control lines. You really cannot just tap one and feed direct to an LED without messing with stuff.
I suppose you could take off ISA pin B13 : /IOW = I/O Write and feed it to a transistor using it as an inverter/buffer then to a R/C network then to a LED so it "flickers" when active, otherwise it would be either on or off like a floppy drive/HD led AFAIk.
That way any time ISA bus data writes are done you would see it. just a guess...and am probably totally wrong 😁

Hate posting a reply and then have to edit it because it made no sense 😁 First computer was an IBM 3270 workstation with CGA monitor. Stuff: https://archive.org/details/@horun