Re: Problems with the Kulaga/Mauch DRO setup

Par Willen wrote:

> I was intrigued by Tom Kulagas DRO-project and decided to go for that
> setup for my lathe. To save time and to get it right from the start I
> ordered the whole kit with etched board from Dan Mauch and today I put
> the DRO-board together. A slight little problem came up though, the PC
> refuses to boot with the card in place.
>
> I've tried the card in two PCs, one a standard Intel Pentium 100 machine
> and the other one a real old Intel 8088 DOS machine. They're both
> erfectly clean PCs, not one extra card in there, I've tried all jumper
> settings and different slot locations etc. etc. and I get the same
> results on both machines, i.e. the PCs won't even boot with the DRO card
> in place. I checked the card over real good and I can't see anything
> wrong with the etching or soldering.

The fact that TWO computers (different types, too) fail to boot pretty
solidly indicates it is jamming the ISA bus. It could be loading down the
data or address bus. (I don't think this board uses any interrupts, and
certainly not DMA). You might try using a DVM to check for a short
between any two pins on the edge connector, other than the power
pins, which are near both outer ends of the connector. Another
possible problem is that one of the chips that is supposed to be an
input only chip has been damaged by static, and has shorted that
signal to power or ground. Without a lot of test gear, it could be
quite hard to troubleshoot this problem.

Could you have put a chip in the wrong location, or placed it with
the pin 1 orientation wrong?

> What throws me is that the PCs refuses to even boot, it doesn't even
> signal the monitors when the DRO-card is in place.

Not surprising, as the video card needs the bus to be working
close to 100% to do anything.

Jon