Favourite connector/cage system for multiboard systems?...

[Phil Hobbs]

Hi, all,

Your poor humble scrivener is down to eight FIXMEs in the third edition
of BEOS, and has one or two things that need updating.

One is the issue of card cages and so forth. BITD a lot of setups used
VME, NIM, CAMAC, VXI and other module standards. I remember the Data
Translation guy (\"Fred Molinari, President\") hamming it up on the back
of Electronic Design with all the bus standards they supported.

I haven\'t built an instrument with a card cage in it for 30 years, and
apart from PCIe in computers and big routers, I haven\'t seen one in a
long time either.

Do people still use them, and if so, which are the popular ones?

Cheers

Phil Hobbs;

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC / Hobbs ElectroOptics
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510

http://electrooptical.net
http://hobbs-eo.com

 

[Michael]

Hi Phil

Haven\'t built instruments with card cages, but I have experience with
CAMAC, VME, VXI, CPCI and ATCA.

You might want to look into PXI and PXI Express.
Not the cheapest, but NI is supporting it. (replace \'but\' with \'as\' if
you prefer)

Do you have an application in mind?

Cheers

Michael

Am 25.11.20 um 22:10 schrieb Phil Hobbs:

Hi, all,

Your poor humble scrivener is down to eight FIXMEs in the third edition
of BEOS, and has one or two things that need updating.

One is the issue of card cages and so forth.  BITD a lot of setups used
VME, NIM, CAMAC, VXI and other module standards.  I remember the Data
Translation guy (\"Fred Molinari, President\") hamming it up on the back
of Electronic Design with all the bus standards they supported.

I haven\'t built an instrument with a card cage in it for 30 years, and
apart from PCIe in computers and big routers, I haven\'t seen one in a
long time either.

Do people still use them, and if so, which are the popular ones?

Cheers

Phil Hobbs;

 

[Don Y]

On 11/25/2020 2:10 PM, Phil Hobbs wrote:

Hi, all,

Your poor humble scrivener is down to eight FIXMEs in the third edition of
BEOS, and has one or two things that need updating.

One is the issue of card cages and so forth. BITD a lot of setups used VME,
NIM, CAMAC, VXI and other module standards. I remember the Data Translation
guy (\"Fred Molinari, President\") hamming it up on the back of Electronic Design
with all the bus standards they supported.

I haven\'t built an instrument with a card cage in it for 30 years, and apart
from PCIe in computers and big routers, I haven\'t seen one in a long time either.

Do people still use them, and if so, which are the popular ones?

Is your question \"Do people still use card cages in products\"? Or,
\"What interconnect *standards* do people use for multiboard systems\"?

Personally, I dislike \"fingers\" on PCBs as it means the board house
has to know how to deposit gold AND puts tighter tolerances on that
edge of the board. Instead, I prefer purchasing (gold plated, if
necessary) connector pairs from a vendor who has the plating process
down pat.

[It also means a bad connector can be replaced -- at a relatively
low skill level -- without having to scrap the board]

My current product hard-wires boards/modules together at their
edges. This to cut cost, minimize size, discourage tinkering and
increase overall reliability (connectors elided).

[I rescued a DSO that\'s sole problem was an interconnect *board*
(think of it as a rigid ribbon cable) that had become dislodged,
internally.]

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Thursday, November 26, 2020 at 8:10:36 AM UTC+11, Phil Hobbs wrote:

Hi, all,

Your poor humble scrivener is down to eight FIXMEs in the third edition
of BEOS, and has one or two things that need updating.

One is the issue of card cages and so forth. BITD a lot of setups used
VME, NIM, CAMAC, VXI and other module standards. I remember the Data
Translation guy (\"Fred Molinari, President\") hamming it up on the back
of Electronic Design with all the bus standards they supported.

I haven\'t built an instrument with a card cage in it for 30 years, and
apart from PCIe in computers and big routers, I haven\'t seen one in a
long time either.

Do people still use them, and if so, which are the popular ones?

Can\'t answer the first part of the question, but the fact that board line suppliers still stock DIN41612 connectors - element 14 has 421 different parts - does suggest they do.

I first ran into them in the late 1970\'s, and they were a whole lot better than gold-plated fingers on printed circuit boards.

In the 1980s I used the mixed signal variants where you lost a bunch of pins and replaced them with holes for for SMB-sized coax connectors (or large diameter pins if you wanted lots of current).

There are other options, but that one does seem to be popular. IIRR VME used them.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Saturday, November 28, 2020 at 11:44:00 AM UTC+11, Jon Elson wrote:

Phil Hobbs wrote:

I\'ve used some Japanese connectors that were distributed through 3M in the
US. They come in a variety of lengths, but I used the 68-pin size, mostly.
Digi-Key and Mouser have them.
Some of the part numbers are :
P50E-068P1-SR1
and
P50E-068P1-RR1-EA
These connected a row of daughter cards to a motherboard. The daughter
board connector is a right angle type.

These is also available a variety for crimpinng to high-density ribbon
cable.

The DIN 41612 connectors come in lots of variations. Some are designed to crimp onto 64-wqy ribbon cables. Element-14 has two variations in stock in Australia.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Friday, November 27, 2020 at 2:16:06 AM UTC+11, John Larkin wrote:

On Wed, 25 Nov 2020 16:10:16 -0500, Phil Hobbs
pcdhSpamM...@electrooptical.net> wrote:

Hi, all,

Your poor humble scrivener is down to eight FIXMEs in the third edition
of BEOS, and has one or two things that need updating.

One is the issue of card cages and so forth. BITD a lot of setups used
VME, NIM, CAMAC, VXI and other module standards. I remember the Data
Translation guy (\"Fred Molinari, President\") hamming it up on the back
of Electronic Design with all the bus standards they supported.

I haven\'t built an instrument with a card cage in it for 30 years, and
apart from PCIe in computers and big routers, I haven\'t seen one in a
long time either.

Do people still use them, and if so, which are the popular ones?

We still sell a lot of VME. VME has outlasted roughly a dozen
come-and-go busses that were supposed to kill it.

We might make our own VME crate soon. They tend to be expensive.

IIRR VME used double Eurocards with two 96-pin DIN41612 connectors per card..

It has been extended.

My 1988 project used triple extended Eurocards to make room for enough - three - mixed signal DIN 41612 connector to accommodate the roughly 200 pins I needed for power and slow signals and a bunch of high speed signal distributed through balanced coax links as ECL signal levels. It wasn\'t VME, but we got our card cages and racks off-the-shelf from Vero . There were other suppliers.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Gerhard Hoffmann]

Am 26.11.20 um 16:15 schrieb John Larkin:

On Wed, 25 Nov 2020 16:10:16 -0500, Phil Hobbs
pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:

Hi, all,

Your poor humble scrivener is down to eight FIXMEs in the third edition
of BEOS, and has one or two things that need updating.

One is the issue of card cages and so forth. BITD a lot of setups used
VME, NIM, CAMAC, VXI and other module standards. I remember the Data
Translation guy (\"Fred Molinari, President\") hamming it up on the back
of Electronic Design with all the bus standards they supported.

I haven\'t built an instrument with a card cage in it for 30 years, and
apart from PCIe in computers and big routers, I haven\'t seen one in a
long time either.

Do people still use them, and if so, which are the popular ones?

Cheers

Phil Hobbs;

We still sell a lot of VME. VME has outlasted roughly a dozen
come-and-go busses that were supposed to kill it.

We might make our own VME crate soon. They tend to be expensive.

No. VME has out-slept the competition. Does it still have the
/busy-glitch? I had may share of VME fun at 80186 / 386 time, among others
a 16 terminal I/O concentrator based on 80186 for Unix system V on
VME 68k and Fairchild Clipper.

We moved on to Multibus 2, and if you look at PCI you can easily see
who\'s the grandpa. The MB2 message passing coprocessor is on the bottom
right:

<
https://www.flickr.com/photos/137684711@N07/50651112722/in/dateposted-public/lightbox/
>

S/N 0001 took some hits in the junk box over 40 years. But hey, it has
a transputer link and WD3093 SCSI! The layout was done on Orcad SDT,
but, thanks goddess not by me!

We used to use Vero for VME backplanes, crates, and especially the
Vero Powerplane boards with power & GND planes. They were really good.

Cheers, Gerhard

 

[John Larkin]

On Fri, 27 Nov 2020 04:36:05 +0100, Gerhard Hoffmann <dk4xp@arcor.de>
wrote:

Am 26.11.20 um 16:15 schrieb John Larkin:
On Wed, 25 Nov 2020 16:10:16 -0500, Phil Hobbs
pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:

Hi, all,

Your poor humble scrivener is down to eight FIXMEs in the third edition
of BEOS, and has one or two things that need updating.

One is the issue of card cages and so forth. BITD a lot of setups used
VME, NIM, CAMAC, VXI and other module standards. I remember the Data
Translation guy (\"Fred Molinari, President\") hamming it up on the back
of Electronic Design with all the bus standards they supported.

I haven\'t built an instrument with a card cage in it for 30 years, and
apart from PCIe in computers and big routers, I haven\'t seen one in a
long time either.

Do people still use them, and if so, which are the popular ones?

Cheers

Phil Hobbs;

We still sell a lot of VME. VME has outlasted roughly a dozen
come-and-go busses that were supposed to kill it.

We might make our own VME crate soon. They tend to be expensive.

No. VME has out-slept the competition. Does it still have the
/busy-glitch?

We don\'t use /busy, so I don\'t know. The basic bus transactions is
/ds0 and /ds1 into the target, and /dtack back. Pretty simple
handshake.

Process i/o and most system hardware simulation doesn\'t need to be
especially fast, so VME is fine for that. The big 6U eurocards have
lots of room for connectors and you don\'t have to crawl around in the
dark under a desk to get at them.


I had may share of VME fun at 80186 / 386 time, among others

a 16 terminal I/O concentrator based on 80186 for Unix system V on
VME 68k and Fairchild Clipper.

We moved on to Multibus 2, and if you look at PCI you can easily see
who\'s the grandpa. The MB2 message passing coprocessor is on the bottom
right:


https://www.flickr.com/photos/137684711@N07/50651112722/in/dateposted-public/lightbox/


S/N 0001 took some hits in the junk box over 40 years. But hey, it has
a transputer link and WD3093 SCSI! The layout was done on Orcad SDT,
but, thanks goddess not by me!

We used to use Vero for VME backplanes, crates, and especially the
Vero Powerplane boards with power & GND planes. They were really good.

Cheers, Gerhard

What we like about VME is that people buy it in big hunks.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/qjz9mfux9ucesw8/HTI_VME_Cage.jpg?raw=1

In a way, the crate and crate controller overhead discourages small
buys from grad students and such.

--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc trk

The cork popped merrily, and Lord Peter rose to his feet.
\"Bunter\", he said, \"I give you a toast. The triumph of Instinct over Reason\"

 

[Jon Elson]

Phil Hobbs wrote:

Hi, all,

Your poor humble scrivener is down to eight FIXMEs in the third edition
of BEOS, and has one or two things that need updating.


I haven\'t built an instrument with a card cage in it for 30 years, and
apart from PCIe in computers and big routers, I haven\'t seen one in a
long time either.

I\'ve used some Japanese connectors that were distributed through 3M in the
US. They come in a variety of lengths, but I used the 68-pin size, mostly.
Digi-Key and Mouser have them.
Some of the part numbers are :
P50E-068P1-SR1
and
P50E-068P1-RR1-EA
These connected a row of daughter cards to a motherboard. The daughter
board connector is a right angle type.

These is also available a variety for crimpinng to high-density ribbon
cable.

Jon