Asante MacCon daughter card incompatibilities?

[jckarter]

I’ve got an SE/30 with an Asante MacCon ethernet and Micron Xceed video cards stacked up in the PDS slot. I recently got a MacCon SE(non 30) card off of eBay because I saw it had the daughter card with the removable AUI section, and I was hoping to use the new daughter card so I could mount the external display connector for the Xceed without resorting to hacks. However, when I connect the SE/30’s MacCon to the split daughter card, I don’t get any activity out of the 10baseT connector. If I switch back to the daughter card I had before, it still works fine.

Before I get too deep into debugging the hardware on this new daughter card, I wanted to make sure, are there any known incompatibilities between variants of the MacCon controller and daughter cards? I didn’t get that impression from browsing the forums, and from previous repair experiments I’ve done I worked out that the cable pretty much just carries AUI, but I thought I’d check what other folks’ experience with them is.

 

[zefrenchtoon]

From the manual the daughter card seems to have a little switch to select which port is in use. Did you check that ?

 

[zefrenchtoon]

Also, if you check this thread, you will see that the daughter card should work

MacTwister: a MacCon/Etherport/Dayna Twisted Pair breakout board

Hello, I would like to share my project that is long overdue for publishing here - MacTwister, a fairly universal Twisted Pair breakout board for a variety of SE and SE/30 network cards. It’s about the small PCB that you screw to the computer chassis that contains an external connector. I was...

68kmla.org

 

[jckarter]

Thanks @zefrenchtoon! On this variant of the daughter board, there's a jumper that sets "Force AUI", and I did try it both open and closed without success. The seller reported that the board was fully working for them with their SE, so I wonder if some component is marginal in a way that only affects the SE/30 variant of the controller. I did notice that the yellow LED blinks seeming randomly on some occasions, which is a symptom I was also seeing with my MacCon SE/30 before I figured out that it had a dead clock chip, so I wonder if there's a similar issue with the clock chip on this daughter card. Thanks for the confirmation that it ought to work!

 

[zefrenchtoon]

You’re welcome. Happy to help

 

[jckarter]

Your comment helped me figure it out! When you mentioned that the older model daughtercards had the switch to choose whether to use the MAU or 10baseT link, but this version autosenses the connection, I remembered that older 10baseT cards don't always successfully detect a link when connected to modern switches. Sure enough, when I connect through an old 10baseT hub, it works perfectly. So the incompatibility wasn't the new daughter card with the NIC, but with my switch. Thanks for the hint!