In Gary W. Johnson's book, "LabVIEW Graphical Programming", 2nd
Edition, 1997, on page 246 he discusses the "Intel MicroLAN 9-bit
protocol RS-485 multidrop system". He says, "A few instruments" use
this protocol.
At my previous employment I became an expert on this protocol. I
developed from scratch a LabVIEW data acquisition and statistical
archiving and graphing system using the Cimetrics Technology NBS-2
card mentioned by Mr. Johnson. This work included an elaborate
modification of the skeleton assembly language interrupt routine
provided by Cimetrics. I created that modification and wrote all the
LabVIEW, and the whole thing became a successful product in the
semiconductor industry.
Most recently I re-thought the whole project and got
funded to develop
an entirely new approach to the same basic problem, which is
non-invasively to monitor all traffic on an Intel MicroLAN multidrop
system. I successfully managed the creation of a PCI card with an
8051-family microprocessor, a dual-port RAM, and a PCI bridge chip. I
could do this card all over again without stepping on any proprietary
toes.
My point is, that Mr. Johnson wrote "Maybe one day there will be a
suitable PCI board and driver" for the Intel MicroLAN protocol. Right,
I got exactly that. So, the question is, what is the potential market
for such a device, together with high-level software that uses it for,
say, hard realtime data mining? Do you know what are the "few
instruments" he was talking about? What do you know?
