Once the magic smoke comes out, things don't work any more.

John Kasunich
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Sun, 10 Dec 2006

Group Buy of Mesa 5i20 "Anything I/O" cards

The Mesa Electronics 5i20 "Anything I/O Card" contains a 200K gate Xilinx FPGA, and an interface to the PCI bus. Seventy-two of the FPGA pins are brought out of the back of the PC on three 50 pin ribbon cables. What you do with those pins is up to you, because the FPGA is reconfigurable. The board comes with several FPGA configurations, such as 4 channel analog servo (4 DACs, 4 encoder counters, and misc I/O). EMC2 already has a driver for the 4 channel servo configuration.

The normal price of the board is $199, which is quite reasonable for what you get. But the five-piece price is even better: $159. Several other EMC people are interested in the 5i20, and we're working on a group buy to get the five-piece price.

In addition to the FPGA board, Mesa sells various interface boards. Each one uses a 50 pin ribbon cable to connect to 24 of the 72 I/O pins. To save on shipping, we will be group-buying any interfaces that people want as well. So far we have reached the five-piece price for the 7i31, 7i33, and 7i37 interface cards.

It looks like SWPadnos is going to be placing the actual order. He has a PayPal account, so people can pay by credit card instead of messing around with checks. There is a surcharge, probably 2.9% + $0.30, for PayPal (will be confirmed later). He will also of course have to charge for re-shipping the items to the individual buyers. That charge will probably be in the range of $10-15. Since the five piece price saves $40 on the 5i20, and there may be additional savings on breakout boards, etc, it's still a pretty good deal.

Timing
We intend to place the order before the end of the year. What with the holidays and such, we're setting December 20 as the deadline for people to get in on the group buy. That will allow SWPadnos time to collect everybody's details and payments, and place the order. Although SWPadnos will be placing the actual order and reshipping the items, for now I'm the point man for the group buy. Contact me by email (see the sidebar of this page) to be added to the list:

Here is the list so far:

The 5i20 and some of the interface boards connect to the outside world through 50 pin ribbon cables. Old single ended SCSI cables are a good source of cheap to free cable assemblies. Eventually though, you probably want to connect discrete wires to the board. That is where breakout boards come in. We've found two versions so far:

• The Winford Engineering BRK2x25 is very nice, with 45 degree angled terminal blocks that make it easy to wire to either row of screws. They cost $45 each.
• The DaqStuff d-500013 has right angle terminals that make it more difficult to wire the left row of pins, but only costs $25 each. (Note: the "hard to wire" left hand row is the even numbered pins. If you are connecting to the 5i20, those are the ground pins, and the signals are on the odd numbered pins. If you are connecting to one of the 7iXX interface boards, check its documentation to see what is odd and even.)

We're not doing a group buy on the breakout boards. The Winford Engineering one does have price break at 10+ pieces, but its only $3, and that won't cover the cost of re-shipping them to individuals. The DaqStuff board doesn't have a price break at all. If you want them, just order them direct.

(posted: 10 Dec 2006 18:17) (permalink)