Re: [lm-sensors] aftermarket PCI or ISA monitoring board?

[Guenter Roeck <guenter.roeck@ericsson.com>]

On Sun, Jan 09, 2011 at 07:10:53PM -0500, Stan Hoeppner wrote:
> Jean Delvare put forth on 1/9/2011 4:11 PM:
> 
> > If soldering things is an option, then many recent boards have an SMBus
> > header, so it would be possible to choose any supported SMBus-based
> > hardware monitoring device and wire up everything manually.
> 
Good point ...

> The board in question is 10+ years old, but it does have a 5 pin SMBus header.
> The board is the legendary Abit BP6.  Unfortunately the manual doesn't provide
> the pin assignments for this SMBus connector, though it does for all the other
> connectors.  Strange.
> 
Of the five pins, one will be Ground, one will be VCC. There may be another ground
or possibly alert, plus I2C data and clock.

Should be easy to figure out Ground and VCC. That leaves three additional pins
to play with, so it should be possible to find out what is what by trying.

> Could you suggest a few inexpensive models of such lm-sensors compatible SMBus
> based hardware monitoring devices containing, say, 1-3 thermal sensing circuits
> (with probes/lead wires), and maybe a few non-PWM fan RPM sensing/driving circuits?
> 
max6696 supports three sensors (one internal, two external). Besides the sensors,
all I needed to wire the chip was one capacitor and one resistor, plus another
capacitor for each of the external sensors. The datasheet has a nice sample picture.
You might need additional resistors to set the chip's i2c address if you want to support
more than one chip, plus a zener diode and another resistor to generate 3.3V if the board 
only provides 5V.

Tricky part is that the chip is in uMAX or QSOP package with .5mm or .635mm pitch,
so you'll need a good soldering iron and a calm hand to do the soldering, or find
some HW guy to do it for you.

Of course, you could simply buy MAX6695EVKIT. I don't know the price, but usually 
Maxim's evaluation board pricing is quite reasonable.

> Also, will lm-sensors and the sensors user space program work with two
> monitoring chips simultaneously?  Does anyone know if phpsysinfo will, or can
> with additional tweaking, display data from both devices?
> 
max6696 supports 9 i2c addresses, so you could connect up to 9 chips
to a single i2c bus.

Guenter


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