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Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!agate!headwall.Stanford.EDU!unixhub!ditka!ohare!kls From: kls@ohare.Chicago.COM (Karl Swartz) Subject: Re: 4 port 16550A/16554 serial cards -- Kouwell vs. STB Message-ID: <1993Aug24.070930.22237@ohare.Chicago.COM> Organization: Chicago Software Works References: <1993Aug18.205035.11643@ohare.Chicago.COM> Date: Tue, 24 Aug 1993 07:09:30 GMT Lines: 43 Last week I asked about Kouwell vs. STB 4 port cards for use on my NetBSD system. The sketchy info in several adverts suggested they were comparable, except for the $40 lower price of the Kouwell board ($69 vs. $109). I only got a few replies, mostly "please let me know what you find out," so this afternoon I paid a visit to Central Computer, in Santa Clara, California, as they stock both boards. The STB board offers a slightly broader IRQ selection (2-5, 10-12, 15) than the Kouwell board (2-7). It only offers 8 port addresses to choose from, however, while the Kouwell gives at least 14 different choices, so one can have 3 of the Kouwell boards in addition to the usual COM1 and COM2 for a total of 14 serial ports whereas a maximum of 8 serial ports (including COM1 and COM2) are possible with the STB board. Both boards can attach as many as all four serial ports to a single IRQ, though currently NetBSD does not support this as far as I know. For connections, Kouwell uses a 37 pin connector with a special cable which splits into 4 DB-25s. STB uses four DIN-8 connectors with short adapter cables that have a DB-9 at the other end. I found that a bit annoying because it means an extra weird cable to adapt DB-9 to DB-25 but I guess most PC folks will already have those. I checked and the pinout is totally different from a Mac, which is good indeed given how barren the Mac serial port is of necessary modem control signals. It also is different from a NeXT, for whatever that's worth. They looked pretty even at this point, but I wanted to check the UARTs in the Kouwell. At least one ad had said they were 16550As, which I need since I intend to connect high-speed modems to them. Good thing I looked, as the board used 16450 chips, which don't have the FIFO. They were socketed, so one could replace them, but at about $10/each the price difference vanished. (The STB uses a single 16554, which is four 16550A UARTs on a single chip.) I went home with an STB. Now I'm trying to decide whether to upgrade to NetBSD 0.9 or build a new kernel on 0.8 with support for 4 serial ports. -- Karl Swartz |INet kls@ditka.chicago.com 1-415/854-3409 |UUCP uunet!decwrl!ditka!kls |Snail 2144 Sand Hill Rd., Menlo Park CA 94025, USA Send sci.aeronautics.airliners submissions to airliners@chicago.com