New PC/104 device?

[jmhill]

I have a friend looking for a more-hardware-oriented type project.  Given that PC/104 basically uses the ISA bus, it's no so hard to design a card that plugs into the bus.

The question I have is, what about TinyCore?  Suppose the new card provides acquisition with an analog to digital converter and a digital to analog converter.  Does anyone know how to access the new card?  How much effort that might be?

Thanks in advance;
Jonathan

[Rich]

Hi John
You may have to write or modify an existing driver to do that. In order to access the
board you need to address the hardware directly which is privileged operation. The
way that's usually done is by a driver running in kernel space manipulating the
hardware when requested by user program running in user space. The driver could
be accessed through /dev or /proc, and if written correctly would limit access to your
boards address space and nowhere else in the system. That's part one. Part two is
writing a program to talk to the driver. You could write it in C, Basic, Perl, etc. There
are plenty of compilers in the repository. If you wanted to keep it a little simpler you
could talk to the driver by writing a script. If I oversimplified any of this I invite one of
experts to please chime in. By the way, if you google COMEDI you will find more
information about device drivers for data acquisition boards.