I am presently operating a flying probe tester controlled by a PICMG1.0 computer.
PICMG is a standard addressing issues of various bus architectures.
The computerconsists of a full length single card PC slotted in a PCI and ISA bus slot.
ISA is used to provide a home for motion control and measurement systems cards while PCI bus is used to cater to the frame grabber requirement.
The PC used to run winNT originally but now runs XP. In fact the original PC card has been upgraded to one of these
http://www.ibase.com.tw/2009/IB9...
My world was at peace until one day the frame grabber card went tits up.
The image in a window turned mustard yellow ( literally ) and the camera alignemnt was no more. I routed camera video to an external screen and lived with this problem. Recently ( half a year ago i noticed the motion system wasshowing some positional errors. This was raced to rotary shaft encoders and now with the new shaft encoders and a replaced linear power supply everything bar the vision is great.
I purchased a second hand frame grabber on ebay and voila... mustard screen stillpersists.
On to the real problem. When the vision card failed initially the PC showed some unusual problems which disapeared oupon removal of offending card. The failed card had the same effect on other PCs.
The replacement card does not interfere with operation of the PC and as already noted does not work.
Onto the questions:
a) has the original failure done some damage to the PCI interface on the PC card?
b) is there some way of testing the health of the PCI bus?
c) if damaged, is the damage bus wide ( sorry no pun intended)?
d) are the PCI slots isolated from each other such that a failure of one slot does not affect adjacent slots?
All comments welcome