psyrex

I thought I'd write this up so anybody who will use these boards in the future might have something to reference.

The following wouldn't matter if you were running compactflash as the boot drive with EWF, since you don't care about shutdown procedures. I have some benchmark data about CF vs 7200rpm 2.5" drives that i've also developed the past few days, but that's a whole 'nother topic/thread.



I got the ECM-5716, a 5.25" SBC, and been working on it for the past few days (to the exclusion of studying for my midterms, dammit). It uses regular ATX power, but there is a slight difference for the *power button*. Normal boards power up by using a switch that connects the PWON line down to ground momentarily. Startup/shutdown controllers like my M1-ATX hits the power button by grounding down the pins momentarily as well.

Unfortunately, the ECM-5716 does not work that way. It has two buttons, a power and a standby switch
- The power switch activates when the PWRBT line goes up to 5v momentarily.
- The standby switch activates when EXTSM# drops down to 0v momentarily. This switch cannot start the computer.

I solved this by connecting the power switch of the M1-ATX to the standby switch, setting windows to shutdown when Standby is hit, and then set the BIOS on the board to start up whenever it sees power (not waiting for a signal on the standby line). Fortunately, the M1-ATX sends the ground pulse to the standby switch before the board fully goes through POST, so it doesn't affect boot up. I now have a board that will start and stop correctly.

I've noticed that the side affect of this is that I no longer can run minlogon, since it doesn't monitor the buttons. Only the regular winlogon can handle this shutdown method. If minlogon is really necessary, a solution can be had by pulsing a signal through the serial port, and monitor that for shutdown signals.