PC Card conforming to EN 50221

[Mikael Hakman]

On Tuesday, May 30, 2006 12:20 AM Dominik Brodowski wrote:
> On Thu, May 18, 2006 at 02:01:29AM +0200, Mikael Hakman wrote:
>> Is it possible to access a PC Card conforming to EN 50221 "Common
>> Interface
>> Specification for Conditional Access and other Digital Video Broadcasting
>> Decoder Applications" standard? The card is inserted into computer's
>> PCMCIA
>> slot.
>
> Is it a 16-bit PCMCIA card or a 32-bit CardBus card? If it's a 32-bit
> CardBus card, it may just work fine -- you should ask on the Linux DVB
> list
> in addition anyways.
>
> But if it's a 16-bit card: AFAIK no, but I cannot say for sure. At least
> no
> existing PCMCIA device driver in the Linux kernel sources seems to match
> the description given by you. However, there may be external drivers
> available; and as long as you have access to the specification you
> should be able to write such a device driver yourself.
>

I think it could be regarded as 16-bit card. Main problem is that the spec
uses some of address lines as data input! While it would be theoretically
possible to arrange dummy reads/writes from/to such addressess that the card
would perceive this as valid input, I'm not sure this would be pratically
feasible. So far I have been unable to find a driver or external hardware
for those cards that could be connected to _some_ port available in a
notebook computer. One manufacturer said that in few months they will
release a USB device containing DVB-T receiver and a slot for EN 50221
PCMCIA card. I'm not sure whether fuctionality of PCMCIA card (as a pure
decoder) will be accessible by an API and I'm not sure this device would
work under Linux.

I had initiated a thread "PCMCIA CAM/CI inserted into computer's PCMCIA
slot" in linux-dvb about this issue but there is not much info there.

Mikael