Diamond Point D2139 DIMM-PC Backplane

Introduction

This DIMM-PC baseboard was designed to replace a standard PC in a lighting control system for a customer. A conventional PC was a little expensive, physically too large and was vastly over-powered for the task. However, the main problems were that the PC specification was constantly changing due to the rapid ageing of mainstream PC equipment. It was hard to source a PC with an identical specification from month to month. Also desktop PC's were found to be too delicate for the environment in question. Things like hard disks and cooling fans were especially at risk. The D2139 backplane was an ideal solution to this customer as it is rugged (no cooling fans required and the program is stored in IDE flash on the DIMM-PC) and is made from components with long product longetivity. A chassis was also designed for this board (D2133) and is extremely rugged, so much so that you can stand on top of it, drop it from a small height and it will still function. The board has sockets for a DIMM-PC CPU module and an optional DIMM-VGA module. There is a PC/104 socket which was needed as the customer had a PC/104 can bus card.

The keyboard, video, mains inlet and can bus connectors were all brought out to external headers. The floppy and IDE/POWER LED's are also brought out to external headers so could easily be connected to a chassis. For this project, a DIP switch was attached to the parallel port (bottom right) which allows configuration of the CAN bus card by the customer.

Diamond Point designed this backplane and the chassis (D2133). Diamond Point also assemble, fully test and load the customers software. The customer only has to configure the DIP switch to get the unit to work.