Sparcengine 1E serial pinout needed

[Kerien Fitzpatrick]

Our group purchased one of the SPARC 1E and we ran into some trouble with
the serial lines.  The environment in which it was set up (a mobile robot)
caused some noise problems in the serial lines.  Since the ports do
provide for RS-422 it was possible to purchase a RS-422 to RS-232
converter from BlackBox which eliminated our problems.  If you plan to
make extensive use of the serial lines in an environment with high freq.
AC be ready for this.

As a general note, the performance of the SPARC 1E was disappointing at
best.  Comparing the same code between a diskless 1+ with 12Mb memory and
the diskfull (yes, I was using a second ethernet board) SPARC 1E with 8Mb
- the code rmore than three times as fast on the 1+.  A nice alternative
if you need VME is to use one of the SBus <-> VMEbus adaptors.  When we
swapped out the SPARC 1E with a 1+ motherboard and Solflower's SBus <->
VMEbus adaptor (and kept the local disk) we picked up performance from the
diskless 1+ (as would be expected).  Given University discount, the 1+
motherboard + Solflower costs less than the SPARC 1E + 4Mb ECC memory
board.

The SPARC 1E is a good idea, the implementation leaves a lot to be
desired.  We are going with the motherboards + Solflower because of easy
(and cheap) memory upgrade, three SBus slots, price, performance, and
retaining standard SunOS (I've heard 4.1e will be ready first quarter 91).
Beyond that you still have the nice audio I/O port (great on a mobile
robot....you can record audio for playback....have the errorhandler trap -
AAAAARRRRRRRGGGGGHHHHHH!!!! another bug!).

Kerien Fitzpatrick			Pittsburgh, PA 15213
Field Robotics Center			(412)268-6564
The Robotics Institute			Internet: fitz at frc2.frc.ri.cmu.edu
Carnegie Mellon University