Hi,

It is possible to add (at least) two more UARTs to the efika? Can the PSC6 work as UART?

I would like to have the ports with the bare CMOS output voltage (i.e., no rs-232 transceivers), the flow control is not required. Maybe there's some (cheap) PCI card to be fitted into the Efika?

This one looks great, even if I don't know if there's some way to bypass the transceivers:

http://linitx.com/viewproduct.php?prodid=11748

By the way, I successfully used some miniPCI Ralink rt2500 based cards with the pci to minipci adapter. Can I assume that also pci cards based on rt2500 will be 3.3v compliant?

I'm always afraid to fry my Efikas eventually...

Thanks

Giammarco

Yes but it has no CTS line, and PSC6 can't be used as an eUART (Freescale's term for "it has a carrier detect pin") so you will only be able - from the pins on the board at least - use simple RX/TX with no handshake.
You will be fine, then. Make sure you put some adequate protection on the pins such that you do not fry the boards; some small (1-kohm minimum?) resistor will do.
There are lots of PCI serial cards in the world, very expensive mostly, but some quite cheap and they should work under Linux. Whether they are 3.3V or not is up to the manufacturer; neither that I linked are 3.3V keyed, so won't even fit, let alone work.

3.3V is not common on PC desktops (in fact it is practically unthinkable). MiniPCI is fixed at 3.3V so they will all work. Either way you will probably end up sourcing a serial port card from some embedded systems company.
I would not count on it (see above) but check the keying on the board before you buy one, the worst that can happen is the card simply does not appear on the bus. You will not fry anything that has a universal connector but is just a badly designed 5V card.

One thing to look out for is those multiple MiniPCI adapters (2-3 or even 4 slots per PCI slot) as they have a PCI bridge on them, the firmware currently does *not* properly configure PCI bridges, in either transparent or bridge mode, so you may be a little disappointed.

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Matt Sealey

If somebody is interested in, I can confirm that rt2500 works on pci too. Succesfully pinged my AP.

I will try a couple of seem-to-be-3.3v-compliant serial boards and let you know.

Thanks Matt

Giammarco

I'd be interested to know what exact PCI card you have, rt2x00 is one of the few known working wireless drivers in Linux on PowerPC (and Peter and I have rt73 USB keys to test that fact :) - a lot of people have asked for wireless cards, and personally I haven't found any for sale anywhere (in the UK or Germany at least) which I can confirm has the chip.

Care to give an FCC ID from the board or even a manufacturer name?

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Matt Sealey

My cards are manufactured by MSI, model number is PC54G2. It took a long time to find them on eBay about one year ago, but today it seems to be even harder, at least for rt2500 cards.

By the way, ipw2200 is working properly for me, at least with a 2915 board on Efika running SuSE 10.3 (ironically, rt2x00 crashes on SuSE when bringing up the interface, on DENX it worked flawlessly at least in Managed mode). I have also used a Wistron CM9 (Atheros) based miniPCI board on my Efika, with both madwifi and ath5k. As far as I can remember it works with both drivers in managed mode, even if ath5k in ad-hoc mode was not working properly, as the transmission kept on hanging after a few seconds.

All drivers I have used were taken from the compat-wireless package.

Hmm, maybe a SuSE kernel/package snafu then.

It's good to know it does actually work.

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Matt Sealey

I know this is an old post, but I wanted to post here as well - I've gotten a couple cards working in Gentoo on the Efika without any issues - I have an atheros card that works with madwifi-ng as well as the in-kernel ath5k - a D-Link Air Plus XtremeG DWL-G520, H/W Ver B3, F/W Ver. 4.10, unfortunately, no FCCID to be found.

Also an rt2x00 card, the Linksys WMP54G 2.0 - FCC ID Q87-WMP54GV4 - works great, using it currently on the Efika with a WPA network.

Also, if you can find one, the Nintendo WIFI adapter is simply a rt2500usb device (the windows drivers are modified to only work in master mode) - it works for the most part, but as of late, when I've tried it, I just keep getting deauthenticated from ... (Reason: 2) - haven't tracked it down, but I'm assuming its a configuration issue on my end.