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Certain
Chassis Plans' cards don't depend on the operating system
and software. Our ISA-ISA bus expansion kit, Remote Access
line, and external adapters like the CONV232/485 can be
used with any operating system.
Microsoft Operating Systems
- All Chassis Plans' cards, except for the PCI-ISA Kit and USB products,
have support for DOS, Windows 95 / 98 / Me, and Windows
NT4 / 2000 / XP.
- All Chassis Plans' USB products have support for Windows 98(SE
only) / Me, and Windows 2000 / XP. (Prior Windows and Windows
NT versions lack USB bus drivers.)
- The PCI-ISA Kit transparently supports I/O and IRQs under
DOS, and I/O under Windows 95 / 98 / Me. I/O under Windows
NT4 / 2000 / XP and IRQs under Windows 95 / 98 / Me /
NT4 / 2000 / XP are supported, but not transparently;
the software will need to be modified to use the PCI-ISA
Kit's dynamically-assigned I/O and IRQ resources. Contact
us for support with this non-transparent interface.
- A full function driver is provided for our watchdog (WDG-CSM
and PCI-WDG-CSM) cards in Windows. It provides functions
to start watchdog protection with a specific timeout, pet
the watchdog, and cancel watchdog protection, and it can
handle the "last-chance" IRQ by notifying the application
or issuing a "soft" system shutdown, to prevent loss of
data in case of a "shallow" lockup.
- All Chassis Plans' cards can be accessed directly under Windows
using ACCES32, which provides the power and flexibility
of register-level control in a Win32 environment.
Linux, Etc. Operating Systems
- Chassis Plans' COM cards are based on a standard 16550
UART, similar to the UARTs on motherboard COM ports, and
can run under the same drivers. Under Linux, our pcifind.plx
PERL script can be used to find what base address and
IRQ have been assigned to a PCI card, while our ISA cards
can be configured to an arbitrary ISA address and IRQ
and can thus also install as one of the standard four
COM ports. Our Configuring
Serial Ports for Linux page describes this process
in detail; it's also provided on our CD.
- All Chassis Plans' cards can be accessed directly under Linux using
portio, which provides the power and flexibility of register-level
control in a Linux environment. portio uses a kernel module
to achieve this access from any user level, so we also document
the use of ioperm() and the I/O functions from <sys/io.h>,
which allows programs run as superuser or root to do this
without any other modules.
- Chassis Plans' provides Linux samples for a number of cards, and
instructions for converting DOS C/C++ code to Linux.
Other Operating Systems
- Chassis Plans' COM cards can be used under any operating system
for the same reason they work under Linux: they're based
on a standard 16550 UART.
- We fully support direct register-level control, the basis
of adaptation to any new environment, with manual documentation,
samples, and helpdesk support. If you've got a programmer
for the high-powered operating system of your choice, we
can show them how to use the card.
Third-Party Software Suites
- Chassis Plans' provides specific drivers for a number
of cards in Labtech Notebook and Labtech Control (see
our Labtech Software page)
and LabVIEW.
- Chassis Plans' COM cards can be used under such suites for the
same reason they work under Linux: they're based on a standard
16550 UART.
- Many Chassis Plans' cards use other standard chips, like the 8255
digital I/O chip or the 8254 counter/timer chip, and can
take advantage of standard drivers for these chips.
- Register-level support in the suite and/or the ability
to use ACCES32 allows the use of all Chassis Plans' cards via direct
register-level control, which we fully support.
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