watchdog, and must then access an I/O port at regular intervals to
stop the watchdog timing out. If your program fails to do this the
watchdog times out and the alarm operates, indicating that your
program has crashed. Once the watchdog has been started it cannot
be stopped by anything except a complete system reset. The
watchdog can be set to operate with either a two second or a ten
second timeout.
The two "option" inputs OPT1 and OPT2 can each be used for either
an analogue or an optoisolated digital input. OPT1 can operate an
alarm when the voltage is lower than that set on a potentiometer or
when there is no current into the optoisolator. OPT2 works the other
way round.
Each of these monitoring functions can be set individually to operate
the buzzer, relay or interrupt by writing to mask registers. The status
of these registers and of the monitoring functions can be read back
at any time.
The PCSYSCON can also be used for digital I/O. One group of eight
lines on the connector can be read directly as inputs. Another group
can be written to as outputs.
It is vitally important to be able to do some form of self-test with
industrial equipment. The PCSYSCON contains many features to
assist in this. At the lowest level the PCSYSCON has two light-
emitting diodes (LEDs). These are intended for use on initial
installation, since they will not usually be visible inside the PC. The
red LED flashes each time the board is accessed. This is useful to
check that the board is at the correct address. The green LED can
be switched on by a user program. It can be used in a power-on test
routine to indicate to a technician that the board has passed. In
addition, the PCSYSCON has an identifier code at a fixed location in
the I/O map. This can be used to identify a board at a particular
PCbus I/O location. The code for the PCSYSCON is 80
(hexadecimal) (128 decimal).
A 50-way D-type connector is used to connect to the PCSYSCON.
This allows a ribbon-cable to connect to individual cable connectors
or to other boards which either modify the signal in some way or
contain other types of connectors. These are called signal-
conditioning boards.
The 50-way connector is compatible with Arcom's signal-
conditioning scheme, which lets you connect dozens of different
types of signal-conditioning boards to process signals to or from the
PCSYSCON.
There are two 10-way headers which may be used for some I/O
inside the PC. They carry a subset of the signals on the 50-way
connector.
2192-09065-000-000
Section 1. Introduction
Page 6
J278 PCSYSCON