21 Apr
2011
21 Apr
'11
2:24 p.m.
Free for a little gas money - a new? in box with manual 6940B general
purpose IO box, can be used with quite a few HP systems with the right
interface card, which we do not have. Located in Boulder, CO, and can
deliver to SLC, Seattle, or the Bay Area. It is not too huge, about ten
inches of rack space. Let me know now!
If I'm remembering the model number right, this is what HP called a
'multiprogrammer'. It's quite a fun device, it must be one of the few I/O
systems with a lights-and-switches (well, buttons' frontpanel...
Anyway, a few comments.
If it really is 'new in box', it won't have any I/O cards in it, just the
control logic cards. Said I/O cards incldue things like relay boards,
ADCs, DACs, digital I/O, etc. It's pretty useless without any such cards.
I was luck, I found an e-bay seller seelling a load of boards he'd pulled
fro,m such a unit which totally filled up mine.
It's not large (4U rack, IIRC), bnt it is heavy. There's a large mains
transformer in the back.
As for the host interface, it's bascially 16 bits host->multiprogrammer,
13 bits multiprogrammer->host, and a few control lines, Not complicated.
There's a thing called an HP59500 which is an HPIB interface for this
unit (a 2U rack that sits on top of it, that one is very light) which
turns up on E-bay all the time. That should work with any HPIB controller.
-tony