Taxonomy of the MZ104 Contest Kit

As of this date the Hack Embedded Linux for Fun and Prizes contest kits have been distributed and the winners are working on their projects. The MZ104 manual may be found at http://www.tri-m.com/products/tri-m_engineering/manual/mz104.pdf. The prize kits ended up including much more than was described previously:

Figure 1. ISA Passive Backplane and MZ104

The backbone of the contest kit is the three slot 16-bit ISA Passive Backplane (see Figure 1). The backplane provides a convenient way to connect the MZ104 to the set of ISA cards supplied for the contest.

The MZ104 edge connector (top and sides) are used for IDE, COM1/2, floppy drive, parallel port and utility board (keyboard, mouse, USB).

Figure 2. The Contest Kit

The contest kit you see in Figure 2 includes the ISA Ethernet and video cards supplied with the kit. It is designed to come up and running out of the box. The on-board 4MB Flash chip contains the PhoenixBIOS and a resident Flash disk (a solid-state floppy drive). You can also connect a floppy disk drive to the cable and boot from the floppy, or you can put a hard disk or CD on the IDE Bus. The video board starts you out with SVGA graphics, and the Ethernet board allows 10/100Mbps communication with the host development system.

The cable kit shown in Figure 3 shows the set of cables supplied--cables for dual serial port, parallel port, dual floppy drive, dual IDE drive and the Mini I/O board. The Mini I/O board contains connectors for the keyboard, mouse, USB, speakers and IrDA. All of these features (and more) come directly out of the MachZ chip. The MachZ also supports a PCI bus, but that bus is unused (no connect) on the MZ104 board. Other MachZ PC/104 boards from Tri-M either bring the PCI bus off-board or use the PCI Bus for high-speed on-board Ethernet.

Figure 3. The Cable Kit

In Figure 4 the Mini I/O board shows the termination of the utility cable. A detailed description of the cables and connections may be found on the Tri-M web site. The Mini I/O board, recommended for most designs, is shown here with the keyboard and mouse cables connected. The flat ribbon cable connects to the MZ104. The battery is used to power the real-time clock and maintain the BIOS setup settings (hey, it's just like your home PC). There is a speaker connector (hidden by the cable) and, on the right, a reset switch. The utility card (shown in Figures 5a-c) has a mini-speaker (looks like a button) and also a speaker connection.

The MZ104 Utility Card GPS Ready

The MZ104 Utility Card GPS Ready (see Figures 5a-c), supplied with the contest kit, brings the keyboard, mouse, serial port and printer up from the MZ104 board. The floppy and HDU cables still come out of the MZ104. The single and double rows of pins accept one of the two industry standard GPS modules, which sandwiches between the cards. The GPS Module is not supplied with the contest kit but is available through Tri-M.

Figure 5a. MZ-Utility with Cables

Figure 5b. MZ-Utility

Figure 5c. GPS Module