Iyonix USB Card Pinouts

I’m moving my Iyonix motherboard from the rather hefty Panther case it came in (how heavy is that!) , to a much smaller Aria case.

I’ve looked at most of it and it all seems fairly straightforward with the exception of the USB card. The pins on the back for the front USB ports and the Card Reader (not present on the Panther case, obviously) are unusual and I can’t find any documents on them. The card is an NEC 1PC-U20PC2+3N-03. Even the Panther front port cables are peculiar, being:

From outside in:
Upper row – Red-Black-Green-White
Lower row – Red-White-Green-Black

and then there are remaining pins, which I assume make up the other port for the card reader.

Does anyone know the pinouts? Maybe someone who did a DIYonix build has the instruction sheet?

Some googling suggests that the typical colour coding for USB headers is:

• Red = 5V
• Black = Ground
• Green = Data+
• White = Data-

But there’s no de-facto standard for the ordering of the pins, and I can’t find any examples of 8 pin headers (the usual is a 9 pin header – 5×2 with one of the pins chopped off).

I can’t find any examples of 8 pin headers (the usual is a 9 pin header – 5×2 with one of the pins chopped off)

This has a weird 16 pin header, as can be seen here

Clearly the two USB front port connectors on the Panther can be seen, but the final five pins (one is missing for alignment, I presume) are a weird arrangement to make up the third port. It looks like it connected to a three port front access “drive bay” when used in a PC.

Anyone have any photos from inside their Aria?

I’ve found an old reference which I’m fairly sure relates to that card,
Starting at pin 1
V+1…V+2
D+1…D+2
D-1…D-2
Gnd…Gnd
Scr…Scr
NC…Scr
Gnd…D-3
V+3…D+3

Hope that makes sense. So you have the two front ports in a line a the top on 1 and 2, and the card reader at the bottom on 3

I’ve found an old reference which I’m fairly sure relates to that card

That looks like the one, thank you!

After finally getting around to connecting it up, it turns out that the D+ and D- pins for the third USB port are the other way round. Just in case this helps anyone else.

Also, I have noticed that any cards or memory devices attached at boot up seen to cause a delay before the processor, RAM and Acorn ADFS messages appear on screen. I never left anything plugged in when it was in the Panther case, but the card reader makes that too tempting. Anyone else noticed similar issues when leaving storage devices attached?

Anyone else noticed similar issues when leaving storage devices attached?

It could just be RISC OS evaluating what devices are connected when the USB system starts up.

Unlike Windows that puts something on-screen and then starts loading drivers and such, RISC OS’s core is pretty much entirely started up by the time you see the initial welcome message.

Mounting USB storage used to take up to a minute per device. This time was massively reduced by an update four or five? years ago. IIRC it was FAT32FS!

I don’t know why but I think FAT32FS is standard in Pi builds but not any of the others :-(

I remember two problems with mounting storage devices, and neither were FAT32FS related :-)

The first problem was that SCSISoftUSB was scheduling all its USB transfers using the 100Hz ticker, and the small USB buffer size meant that for USB2 devices it was spending about 2/3 of its time idle. This would have affected all USB storage devices.

The second problem was FileCore was mounting discs by reading the map one sector at a time, which is rather slow for USB (lots of driver overhead), especially when combined with the SCSISoftUSB issue. This would have affected FileCore but not DOSFS/FAT32FS.

Both were indeed fixed several years ago (SCSISoftUSB in 2009, FileCore in 2012)

Thanks Jeffrey for correcting me. I now realise it was filecore formatted drives I was thinking of so obviously not FAT32FS related.
We[CJE] do still come across people running 5.16 on their Iyonix’s. A quick google suggests 5.16 was launched in 2009 or 2010!
Though I’d be surprised that andym is using 5.16.

Though I’d be surprised that andym is using 5.16.

The Iyonix hadn’t been in use much since I bought a Beagle xM, so it was still on 5.18 until last week. It’s now on 5.22 though!