22 Jan
2017
22 Jan
'17
12:35 p.m.
On 1/22/2017 12:17 PM, Tony Duell wrote:
On Sun, Jan 22, 2017 at 4:27 PM, W2HX <w2hx at
w2hx.com> wrote:
My friend Sherman has a number of 8/E systems he is going to get going,
and has a setup consisting of a frame, PS, and backplane. He has a
couple of single slot fixtures with switches at the moment which he used
to ring out a potentially working front panel, and found a few failures
there.
Of course after checking the backplane for shorts, and the PS.
He went to the M8330 (Timing board) and has fixed some things on that
board. he will cycle all board sets thru this system setup once he gets
all the way to the processor.
As tony says, I'd start very basic with the backplane. Especially if
there is proximity of the signals there for your specific problem.
One system will be all scrap boards including a front panel which he
retrieved just a tad too late from a scrap operation that had clipped
the flip chip connectors. A strap on Douglas board and rewiring will
fix that one.
There are a lot of places in a system with most of the boards present
that you can have failures, so hard to give a lot of suggestions.
I also hope the other main thing to test, the power supply was checked
out and isn't playing games with you, though it doesn't seem likely it
would make the short you suggest.
thanks
Jim
Hi friends.
I am 100% new to my pdp8e and I am troubleshooting a problem.
The problem is that whenever address bit 7 I asserted, I also see MD bit 4 asserted.
I am hoping there is a simple short somehow between these lines somewhere. I
should mention that my setup has known working boards with the exception of
M8310 does not work (all of my boards were tested in another machine one by one).
So I am hoping the problem noted above might be occurring on the M8310 board itself.
Could it be a short on the backplane? Or on the jumpers between the
backplanes if you
have 2 backplanes in the box (The standard 8/e box is designed to take
2 backplanes,
I believe the rear one was optional but almost always fitted).
I found a
document that describes the signals on the bus located here:
http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/dec/pdp8/pdp8e/Omnibus_leg…
I noticed that B1J (MA7) is directly adjacent to B1K (MD4). Could this be related?
So I decided to pull my 8310 and check the resistance between these signals on the
edge of the board. However, I cannot seem to square the signals named in the PDF
and what I see on the card edge connector on the board.
I am wondering if I am not understanding the PDF correctly. I have the board sitting
on my table with the components facing up and the omnibus card edge is at the
bottom of the card. Going from left to right, do I have connectors ABCD or is it
something else? Maybe DCBA?
With the board like that, Connector A is on the right
(so the order is
DCBA from left
to right, pin A is on the right of each connector, and side 1 is the
solder side.
Other than the reference PDF, is there another
PDF that has a more detailed
description of the bus and the signals?
Do you have the Engineering
Drawing/Printset (same thing, just 2
different names)
from bitsavers? There is also an excellent 3-volume PDP8/e (and /f,
/m) maintenance
manual on bitsavers (I have it on paper too). Volume 1 covers the CPU (which is
what you need now), Volume 2 is 'internal options', Volume 3 is
'external options. In
time you will need all of them.
-tony