And as I just noted after Jay's response, the subject line should say
"11/44" not "11/40." Corrected...
- Josh
On 10/9/15 8:42 PM, Josh Dersch wrote:
Hey all --
Once again, I find myself in over my head debugging a power supply,
this time an H7140 from a PDP-11/44. Here's the skinny:
I examined the supply physically before experimenting and found a
capacitor on the Bias/Interface board that was leaking, bursting and
rather burned-out looking (not a great sign) -- this is capacitor C4
in the printsets on Bitsavers
(
http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/dec/pdp11/1144/MP00897_11X…)
Everything else looked OK physically; I replaced the obviously bad
capacitor at C4.
When power is applied (plugged in, breaker switch flipped to "On") the
relay does not click - based on my readings of the manuals this should
happen after the bias voltages are up to spec. I measure 308VDC on
the lugs on the top of the memory board, so that's at least something
working. Getting to other points to test voltages is a bit more
difficult, especially with those high voltages in the way, what a nice
design :).
Switching the front panel switch to "Local" (or any other position)
has no effect -- no fans, no LEDs, nothing. I've double-checked all
the wiring and everything looks OK.
Capacitor C4 looks to be involved with the START-UP DRIVE signal
circuitry (which drives the relay) so the behavior I'm seeing makes
sense if C4 died and took a couple of things with it (or if something
else died and took C4 with it).
Here's where it gets kind of odd -- I spent some time testing diodes
and transistors in the related area near C4 and while doing so I
noticed that there are four diodes (D1-D4) listed on the schematic
that are missing from my board. "Missing" as in someone clipped them
out at some point -- there are just nubs of the leads left. I'm not
sure why this would have been done, but there were a number of ECOs
applied to this board (a few wires and resistors added) and I don't
want to assume that if I just put four new diodes in that it won't
cause other problems. Anyone know if there were other revision levels
of the bias/interface board that would have done away with these
diodes? Anyone have an H7140 they can easily crack open to compare?
(It's actually relatively easy to get to, if you can get to the
supply...)
Thanks as always,
Josh