Interfacing the ISA bus

posted Jan 25th 2006 11:00am by Eliot Phillips
filed under: misc hacks

isa

Sometimes you need a lot more data lines than are available in a parallel port. Hack-A-Day reader [abhishek dutta] has written a guide for building projects connected to the ISA bus. The guide gives you 32 general purpose I/O lines that you can use for complex project like a digital oscilloscope. To make things easier, some tips on debugging are included as well. Now to unearth a motherboard with an ISA slot

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Comments [20]

Reader Comments

hmm, I may actually try this. I was thinking of setting up some various sensors to an old computer (temp, both air and computer, fan speeds, etc.)

luckily i have an old 400 mhz machine with two ISA slots!

Posted at 11:05 am on Jan 25th, 2006 by Drew

Neat! I’m sure there are a bunch of old Pentium/P2 mothermoards with mostly unused ISA slots.

Also, slightly apropos… There’s was a PCI hack posted not too long ago… http://www.hackaday.com/entry/1234000473062256/

Posted at 11:55 am on Jan 25th, 2006 by ed3

I’ve been thinking about making a synth out of old isa soundboards. While the easiest way would just be to crank up one of the old ISA equipped mobos in the basement, where’s the fun in that?

I think that newer micros should be able to drive the ISA bus, it is pretty simple.

Posted at 12:33 pm on Jan 25th, 2006 by Eric

Nice article.

I was curious to learn about how to interface with ISA but also found myself digging through the linked PDF material over on texasinsturments.com to learn about the IC’s used. Fascinating.

Posted at 1:45 pm on Jan 25th, 2006 by pragma

sweet, I’ve been wondering what to do with that old Pentium I 200 mhz computer sitting in the corner (its got 3 ISA slots on it).

Posted at 2:03 pm on Jan 25th, 2006 by Ben

Ooops..
May just have put a motherboard such as on a bonfire…..
Ah well :P

Posted at 2:28 pm on Jan 25th, 2006 by Will

my family pc, a windows 2k machine now, has an isa slot.

Posted at 2:43 pm on Jan 25th, 2006 by hellbent

Very nice.

This might be a silly question, but would this be useful for applications such as LabView? I think a lot of people working at my department (a university physics dept.) might find this very useful.

Posted at 2:56 pm on Jan 25th, 2006 by Liam

Soyo and Advantech built pentium 4 computers with ISA slots. There is an ISA bridge chip that they use to add it now that the chipsets don’t have the isa bridge built in any more.

The Soyo mobo is SY-P4I845PE/GVISA Plus

Posted at 3:08 pm on Jan 25th, 2006 by eric

liam:
My guess would be no, seeing as you’d need to write a driver for labview to interface with it.

I would look into the many low cost (around $100 USD) USB DAQ devices. Just google for ‘usb daq’.
Or if you really have to do it on the cheap, try this thing:
http://www.hobbyengineering.com/H1516.html

Posted at 5:07 pm on Jan 25th, 2006 by Rossitron

isa was the last true hobby bus. usb is getting there though. ftdi is offering usb modules you can add to your projects, with drivers for most any os. very easy to use.

i wonder if i could make myself an isa to usb converter with an external chassis..

Posted at 6:01 pm on Jan 25th, 2006 by dioxide

Or you could just use a programmable address logic chip so you don’t have to mess around with so many logic ICs :)

Posted at 8:29 pm on Jan 25th, 2006 by Jason spence

I couldn’t find a contact email address, so Ill just put this here. I got a “clapper” for my birthday, the one that turns off your appliances if you clap twice. I was wondering if anyone has heard of any hacks for one of these things, I’m sure theres a lot of fun stuff you could do with it.

Posted at 2:45 am on Jan 26th, 2006 by calvin

Just for those of you who were wondering…

AthlonXP-2700 michael # lspci | grep -i isa
00:11.0 ISA bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8237 ISA bridge [KT600/K8T800/K8T890 South]
AthlonXP-2700 michael #

No isa slots there though, just the bridge, but I think there must be a way to use it…

Posted at 6:07 am on Jan 26th, 2006 by mycroes

you can use the clapper to turn off the lights in your room

Posted at 8:54 am on Jan 26th, 2006 by fucter

PC104 is electrically similar (identical?) to ISA with a different form factor. Lots of cards for experimenting, breaking out lines, etc.

Posted at 1:44 pm on Jan 26th, 2006 by paul h

I don’t want to be the party breaker here, but you can also do PCI, albeit not remotely as easy as this:

http://elm-chan.org/works/pci/report_e.html

Posted at 2:40 am on Jan 27th, 2006 by bogdanm

This company http://www.arstech.com/cgi-bin/ccp51/cp-app.cgi builds isa to usb adaptors that might be useful in these projects.

Posted at 2:12 pm on Feb 10th, 2006 by Ryan

IMPORTANT !!!