PC Weasel 2000 : Intro

*Other People's Hardware

Now shipping PCI version!

Regardless of which open-source operating system you prefer, we all agree on one thing: There's no better server price/performance than a consumer-grade Intel or AMD based PC motherboard running Unix.

Until now, there's been a missing link. Unlike a "real" server, a PC with a conventional BIOS can't be fully administered from a serial (RS-232) console port. Sure, once the OS is up and running it'll support a serial console, but if you want to take the system down to the BIOS (to select a different boot device, for example), you have to drag out the video monitor and keyboard. In remote applications, that just isn't an option.

Of course, this wouldn't happen in a smarter world. In our dreams, all BIOSen have serial drivers and automatically kick them in upon detecting the absence of a video board. Then we wake up, and they don't.

Sigh.

The PC Weasel provides the answer by emulating a video board and keyboard and presenting a serial port to the outside world. Plugged into an available ISA or PCI slot, it takes the characters written by your CPU into its "video" memory and pumps them out its onboard RS-232 port. Characters input by you into the RS-232 port are converted into keyboard scan codes and presented to the motherboard's keyboard connector.

Whether you're using a dumb terminal next to your computer, dialing in via a modem connected to the PC Weasel's serial port, or on the other side of the world, connecting through an (async) terminal server, your machine will think it has a local keyboard and monitor.

ISA VGA

PCI VGA

The PC Weasel also contains an appropriately configurable 16550 UART, which provides your OS with its normal serial console port after boot. The PC Weasel's onboard CPU detects the initialization of this port at bootup and optionally switches the serial connector over to it, taking the video emulation offline. The PC Weasel's CPU then continues to eavesdrop on the console port, and can be brought online again with a user-programmable escape sequence.

Sure, the PC Weasel PCI emulates a VGA board, the PC Weasel 2000 (ISA) emulates an MDA board, and they both emulate a keyboard, but you also get:

Host PC reset, either manually under command from the serial port, or automatically via the PC Weasel's onboard watchdog timer.
Access to POST (Power On Self Test) codes to aid the user in diagnosing a dead motherboard.

The PC Weasel distinguishes itself even further by being an open-source product. Every purchaser receives a source license for the Weasel's onboard microcontroller code. If you don't like some aspect of the board's behaviour as shipped by us, you're free to modify it using a gcc-based toolchain. The code store is flash memory that can be written without special equipment, and there's a second serial port provided for debugging.

The PC Weasel. Sure, it's weird. But we wouldn't have built it if we didn't need it ourselves.

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The PC Weasel is US and Canada patents pending