Anyone got any info on the above board? motorola 68000 CPU, DRAM, ROM
& some IO (2*6821 PIAs, 2*6850 SIOs, 1* 6840), and a bunch of
switches, all on a MultiBUS I card. Also has "master/slave D16 M24 I16
VOL 1982" legended.
Nothing helpfull showing up on a Google so far.
(received it amongst a pile of DEC manuals & TK50s rescued a month or
so ago)
ta.
greg
If anyone has anything they want shipped from the Silicon Valley area to
Munich then please pipe up soon. Last chance...
--
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This is going to seem like an odd question, but here goes...
I've borrowed a Paintjet (colour inkjet) printer from HPCC (as you
probably all know I am somewhat invovled with that club) with the idea of
taking it apart, figuring out how it works, etc. Yes, the club do know I
do that sort of thing :-)
So far, so good. I've figured it out, made notes, and put it back
together. Problem is, I can't get it right...
Here's the problem. There's what I'd call a 'pressure bail' that holds
the paper against the platten. It carries a transparent plastic window.
And that window seems very loose. So loose, in fact that it rubs on the
ink cartridges when you move the carriage. And when the carriage moves to
the far right (parking position), the window drops so far that it jams
the carriage, which then can't move back to the left.
The problem is compounded by the fact that I don't know that it was
correct before I took it apart. I do know I've got no bits left over.
I also didn't dismantle that part of the printer (I did remove the logic
board and mechanism from the case, I did dismantle the mechanism far
enough to remove the carriage and motors). I can't see any obvious places
where something (like a spring) should go, but equally the finish on the
tabs of the window (I did remove that _after_ I discovered the problem in
an attempt to find it) doesn't look as good as I'd expect from old HP.
Maybe some tabs have broken off.
So my questions are (if you have a Paintjet, original version)
Look at the windw in front of the platten on top of the machine. Does
it seem to sag at the front edge, or is it forced up against the inside
of the case.
If you can remove the cover (I can tell you how to do this, it's easy and
doesn't need tools), I'd like to know just what supports the window. Are
there any springs or spring wires/leaves on the front of the pressure
bail? Are there any 'extensions' to the tabs on the window at the front
of the bail?
If I know thrre's something missing/broken I can have a go at
making/kludging it.
-tony
Hmm, getting somewhere; found a dead triac near the input which was
supposed to bypass that 10 ohm resistor that was burning out once the
PSU had started up. Presumably the intention was to allow the PSU to
start a little more gracefully.
Nice bodge story: I just found out why the system wasn't starting up at
all. It had been semi-dismantled since it had died years ago; I'd
reassembled it recently when trying to get it running again.
After much wiring tracing I've just discovered although the cable
between the control panel and the backplane is keyed at both ends, at
one end the connector was on back to front. That hadn't stopped whoever
assembled it at the factory from hammering the keyed connector backwards
into its socket!
I hadn't noticed how bent out of shape the socket was when I reassembled
the machine; I'd simply lined up the key on the connector with the
relevant slot on the socket, then spent ages trying to work out why the
PSU wasn't even trying to start up when the switch was operated. Grrr!
Now, I'm getting a good 5.1V output, but there's a nasty wheezing noise
(not a whine!) from somewhere on the main PSU board. The +12V and -12V
rails are seriously up the spout. With a light load (just a couple of
fans), the fans spin up for a couple of seconds before everything shuts
down for a couple more seconds, then the cycle repeats (the wheezing
sounds like breathing at this point!). With no load the wheezing's
constant and the PSU doesn't shut down, but -12V rail is at -4V and +12V
rail is at +5.3V.
I'm going to load the PSU up with an (unwanted) hard disk in a moment
just in case it's not firing properly because of not enough load - not
sure if I want to risk any boards in there at present though, but of
course it's possible the PSU's not operating properly because there's
some feedback from the absent CPU board not present...
Any widsom appreciated. Sure don't like that wheezing noise - cap or
wound component? Fault or just something not being driven at the right
frequency?
cheers
Jules
Thanks Al, for giving me a retro-headache, that chip's
architecture is even worse than I remembered :-)
It's truly a terrible architecture.
The subroutine call mechanism is a trivial software convention,
you could do it on any machine that had one unit of storage to
dedicate. Only 32 one-deep calls are allowed; 32 is an 8x300
limitation.
The trick is that CALL and RETURN are macros. Here's how it's
done, example trivial code fragment:
0100: CALL subr / This jump subroutine...
0102: ... / ...returns here,
0103:
...
0200: CALL subr / and this call...
0202: ... / ...returns here.
subr: code here
...
RETURN
One 8x300 register is set aside for the return linkage mechanism,
let's call this RETN.
The macroassembler does the work. A local (to the assembler)
variable, let's call it R, increments with every CALL macro
expansion, arbitrarily from the top of the souce file to
the bottom. At the same time, a jump table, call it JUMPS,
is constructed where the Rth entry is [pc + 2], that is, the
address to return to after the call. (2 instructions are needed
to do the CALL.)
CALL expands to:
xmit R, RETN / store R in register RETN
jump subr
RETURN expands simply to:
XEC RETN, JUMPS / execute JUMPS[RETN]
I'm certain I have the syntax wrong, no matter.
The jump table called JUMPS looks like:
JUMPS: jump 0102 / first call + 2
jump 0202 / second call + 2
... / etc
It would be 'interesting' to cobble up a mechanism capable
of recursion, but likely it would be larger than many
subroutines. It could certainly be done though, and worse things
have been shipped.
Hi
I'm not sure if I understand your question. You simply
change the time constants to be in the range you are looking
for. If the original used a 10K and it was 0.1 seconds,
using a 100K will make it 1.0 seconds. The capacitance
values scale similarly.
Do remember to remodel things so that the equation
is all integrations and no differentiations. Doing
integrators is preferred for these problems.
I don't think you change the gains unless you want
different responses. You only change the time constants
so that you can watch the response. Of course, each
step is linear so that you and divide at the input of a
stage and the multiply the output if there is a compliance
issue. Otherwise, just control the size of your stimulus.
Dwight
>From: "ahmed abu aqlain" <adomsr(a)yahoo.com>
>
>I'm Ahmed and I have the following analog computer
>Comdyna GP-6
>and I want to implement a high order control transfer function, but I do not
know how to rescale of the gain coeffecients fro the high order TFs.
>
>so, we send you this letter to help us in this point if it possible.
>
>Thank you very much
> AHMED
>
>
>---------------------------------
>Do you Yahoo!?
> The all-new My Yahoo! ? What will yours do?
>
> From: "Joe R." <rigdonj(a)cfl.rr.com>
>
> Anybody know anything about these?
The Mercury that I know does high end, custom floating-point
semi-super-computers.
They are still in business at http://www.mc.com/.
Ken