Tell me about SBCs, or CPU cards

[LstBrunnenG]

Today I took apart the Daktronics OmniSport 6000 controller that we have in our high school's pool. This thing has just about everything you need to run a swim meet - start inputs, touchpad inputs, scoreboard outputs up the wazoo, the works. The cool thing about it is that it is running an early version of DOS, and it has a 486 processor and a 1 GB hard drive. The question was, could I upgrade it? Could I slap a Pentium or an Athalon XP in there and give it WIndows XP? To find out this I needed a look inside.

At first I was scared and thought the whole thing was proprietary. Then I realized the only proprietary part, really, was the huge power supply - this thing took up half the inside of the case, and it had wires running to most of the touchpad ports and such - I was afraid that was where the data came in too. But then I discovered what I now know is known as an ISA backplane or something close to that. It was simply three ISA slots, nothing more. Two of the slots were populated, and both cards had wires

Then I was perplexed. I knew it had DOS and a 486. Where was the CPU? Then I found a fan sandwiched under an IDE cable (really bright move Daktronics), and I realized that most of the usual stuff (IDE cables, parallel port (by cable to a bracket), P/S2 port, serial ports) was on one card, and all their proprietary ports were on another. Some lettering on the card said "CPU Card" - so I went home and did some searches.

To my surprise, I found plenty of cards, even with Pentiums - bigger ones with Pentium 4s. Now though, I am left with a few more questions.

The Omnisport 6000 currently has a monochrome LCD display (either CGA, EGA, or VGA). For a windows install to be feasible, it has to be color. The "video card" is currently mounted on a riser off the CPU Card, and the mount for it is identical to the one seen here - it's the black thingy in the bottom corner, it looks sort of like the WiFi socket in my P4P800 motherboard. The riser card has a ribbon cable going to the LCD.

Where could I get an LCD for it? Even if I were to find an LCD, how would I mount it and how would I connect it?

 

[Spidey329]

But the real question is, why are you tampering with school goods?



Why is there a need to get XP on it? To run the scoreboard/etc you'd probably need to have software on it, unless you had a dual boot (one for the DOS scoreboard and one for XP). The thing might be so outdated that a new CPU card would be useless for it.

 

[LstBrunnenG]

The CPU card is the whole motherboard - there's really not anything for it not to be compatible with. The software for running the scoreboard runs in XP, trust me, I've tried it on my home box. The advantage of having XP on it is that it could run all the swimming software in the same box that usually requires a laptop on the outside connected by a serial cable, and it would support printers newer than a decade old. And we could email results right off of it. Among other things. And I wouldn't dream of doing anything without approval by the powers that be, but for the powers that be to go along with it, I have to know what I'm doing. For the most part I do - replace the CPU Card, LCD, maybe add an external CD drive, and I'm set.

 

[Tengis]

WTF... I have no clue what your talking about. Im lost. I dont see why you would want to do any of this anyways...