IO Commander
Controlling your Model Railroad from a PC.
Rev. April 1998
Fast Clock
Hardware :
I have not developed any hardware yet. All time output are only available on the CRT,
and most important to other Software.
Future Plans
Read a parallell port and show the time on a 7 segment display (LED or LCD).
I want to use one single 8 bit port for this.
Normally a 7 segment display are driven via a 4 bit hex bus for each digit.
This would require a buss width of 16. I have therefore designed a simple multiplexer.
bit 7 controls a latch. when bit 7 is set to zero, bit 0 - 3 is used to control minutes (0 - 9),
bit 4 - 6 are used to drive tens of minutes with values 0 - 5,
and thereby only requiring 3 bits. When bit 7 is set, bit 0 - 6 will be latched in to
a buffer that drives the hour segments.
Software :
Fast clock is implemented as a Turbo Assembler include file
ioclock.asm (Currently not available on this page)
It is available as a standalone TSR(Terminate and stay resident) - program.
IOCLOCK.COM (not available - download zip file instead)
Don't click on this link, use save link as instead.
I have written a sample QBASIC program that can be used as an example.
CLOCK.BAS
If you write your own, Please let me know.
And if you know how to access IACA (PEEK and POKE) from Visual Basic, Please let me know.
Zip file containing IOCLOCK.COM and CLOCK.bas - use pkunzip
CLOCK.ZIP
User Guide
Download ioclock.com and clock.bas
Load the TSR by typing:
ioclock
IOCLOCK are now started at midnight. Fast ratio is aprox 1:10.
start sample basic program:
qbasic /run clock
current time in upper right corner.
press to go to menu:
commands in menu are (all are one Capital letters followed by [return])
C - Reset Clock to midnight
S - Change speed ratio (1 - aprox 10x, 2 - aprox 5x)
H - Change hours
M - Change minutes
Windows Clock
Added April 1998
I have finally found out how to access memory and i/o ports from visual Pasic (PEEK,POKE,IN,OUT).
This makes it simple to add a Windows interface on top of ioclock.com and ioexec.com. The first
one is a simple clock display, that are syncronized with the rest of the system.
Current version only displays the clock - you are still required to adjust it using the previous
dos utilities. Therefore first start the older dos versions and then start windows and IOWCLCK
I have supplied two zip files for download.
IOWCLCK.ZIP - Runtime containing IOWCLCK.EXE and VBASM.DLL
IOWCLCK.ZIP - The complete Visual Basic project with sourcecode and *.DLL
The DLL should be copied into c:\windows
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