Jean Delvare put forth on 1/10/2011 2:28 AM: > On Sun, 9 Jan 2011 17:35:13 -0800, Guenter Roeck wrote: >> 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. > > Other solutions include the Texas Instruments TMP421 (3 external > thermal sensors), National Semiconductor LM63 (1 external thermal > sensor + 1 fan monitoring input), all LM85-compatible chips (2 external > thermal sensors + 4 fan monitoring inputs, SMSC EMC2103 (3 external > thermal sensors + 1 fan monitoring input) and Analog Devices ADM1031 (2 > external thermal sensors + 2 fan monitoring inputs.) > > You can put more than one of each on the same SMBus segment. > >>> Also, will lm-sensors and the sensors user space program work with two >>> monitoring chips simultaneously? > > Yes, definitely. I'm doing that all the time. > >>> Does anyone know if phpsysinfo will, or can >>> with additional tweaking, display data from both devices? > > As far as I know, phpsysinfo merely parses the output of "sensors", so > there is no reason why it wouldn't work. Thank you all for the suggestions. I'm out of my element here, as I don't participate in this sector of the computer/electronics marketplace. Is there an online retailer or wholesaler where I can actually add one of these devices to a cart, and check out? Or at least see descriptions and pricing info without having to speak to a sales rep, lying to him or her, just to minimize my price on what is really a one time purchase? Do any of them in the U.S. regularly sell in single quantities, with little or no salesperson hassles? Back when I was building custom white box servers and storage systems, I had to spend way too much time "servicing my vendor relationships". A bit oxymoronic that phrase, given that I was the customer... Thanks. -- Stan _______________________________________________ lm-sensors mailing list lm-sensors@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.lm-sensors.org/mailman/listinfo/lm-sensors
