VME Crate Setup Instructions

We have a VME crate and a computer attached. Here is a photo of the entire crate.

The crate controller goes in the leftmost slot of the crate. Here is a closeup of it.

Notice on the controller that there are two ethernet-type wires coming out from it. The blue one is a regular ethernet wire that goes to a router. The gray wire is an ethernet wire that was chopped in half, and the other end of the wire was connected to a parallel port type connector that was then connected to the parallel port on our computer. This wire is exceptionally useful when setting up and debugging the crate controller.

The crate controller does not have a hard drive attached to it. Some of them do, ours does not. So when the controller is first turned on, it has to go and get an operating system from someplace to load into memory to use. For us, the operating system is VxWorks and it gets it from a pc (located next to the rack) running Fedora Core 1. Once the operating system is loaded, users can then write programs to talk to other boards in the crate. I’m not that familiar with writing programs. My job was to just set up the crate.