On Fri, 3 Dec 2010, Tony Eros wrote: I would suspect yes. Check out Ponoko - they've got some great pricing on this kind of thing. http://www.ponoko.com/ g. -- Proud owner of F-15C 80-0007 http://www.f15sim.com - The only one of its kind. http://www.simpits.org/geneb - The Me-109F/X Project ScarletDME - The red hot Data Management Environment A Multi-Value database for the masses, not the classes. http://www.scarletdme.org - Get it _today_! Political correctness is a doctrine, fostered by a delusional, illogical minority, and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end.

On 12/3/2010 9:26 AM, Richard wrote: Interesting suggestion. I'll keep it in mind. The good news is I managed to (at least temporarily) fix most of the broken fingers -- I found the broken off pieces of two of them stuck inside the mechanism while cleaning it out, and they superglued back on very nicely. There isn't a lot of force applied to these fingers, so hopefully they'll hold. The bad news is that even with the mechanism fixed, the machine still exhibits the same problem. I'm wondering if it's the delay line memory -- it appears to have taken a beating at some point (the enclosure got dented in somehow). I'm not really sure how to test it :). Need to dig up a service manual. Thanks for all the repair suggestions! Josh

On 2010 Dec 2, at 11:46 PM, Josh Dersch wrote: A very neat find, CRT-display calcs of that era are rare compared to the Nixie-display models. Of all the calcs I have collected, I still have yet to personally come across a CRT-display one. Generally, in such calculators, an operation initiates a state-machine sequence. Some condition terminates the sequence and returns the machine to the idle state. The behaviour is suggestive of the state-machine hanging up somewhere, but that's not very helpful as there can be a lot in-between sequence start and termination. Often, all the keys will get OR'ed together to produce a signal which triggers an 'operation' flip-flop, which is then reset at the end of the operation. The display working suggests the clock and a lot of the timing is working. In my experience: - you may get lucky and solve the problem in a general cleanup and inspection of the machine, - again with luck, a little bit of inspired tracing around keyboard/operation start/terminate circuitry or timing circuitry will find the problem, - you'll need the schematic to track it down in depth, If you can't obtain the manufacturer's schematic, reverse-engineering is the option. My own preference (from multiple experiences) is to do some cleanup and inspection, and then go straight to reverse-engineering - a long process but you have some greater surety of eventual success and you have the schematic for the next time it breaks. Here's my little tale of the first time I did this: http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~hilpert/eec/misc/ftf/index.html Rick Bensene's writeup suggests the 1162 is an SSI-implementation of the earlier discrete EC-130. I believe there is more info about the EC-130 out there, perhaps including the service manual. It may provide some insight into the 1162. The EC-130 (and by extension the 1162) is one I have wanted to RE and produce a simulation of, both for the vector display and because the arithmetic technique used is different than most. -- On 2010 Dec 6, at 12:21 PM, Tony Duell wrote: I don't know specifically about the 1162, but the delay lines in calculators of that era are often/sometimes sealed up with rivets or otherwise not easily accessible. They were factory-aligned and generally not to be monkeyed with in the field, although the rules are a little different 40+ years later. Most likely it did. Such calculators were very expensive in their day and were worth repairing for the few years of their service life, until LSI obsoleted them. To my observation manufacturers generally produced quite comprehensive service manuals for them. Obtaining one is another matter.

On Mon, 6 Dec 2010, Brent Hilpert wrote: Did you already have a look at the Friden patents? No. 3523282 No. 3526760 No. 3546676 No. 3725873 Christian

As n aside, some of the HP desktop calcualtor patents are very detailed, and include sechematics, commented firmware source, extension ROM sources, and so on. But as you imply, there are often suble differences between the machien described i nthe patent and the actual prodcution model. I regard these patents as a very useful resource and well worth reading, but you need to check against an actual machine. -tony

Well, maybe some people can't, but there are plenty who can :-). More seriously, this is really what reverse-engineering is about, not just tracing out the schematic, but understanding what it is saying. I think we're saying the same things. Certainly for the HP machines (which I am more familiar with), the patents are very useful. They will help you understnad what is going on in the real machine. However, if you attmept to repari a prodcution machine using the patent as a 'service manual' with no more thought then you will run into problems. The machien in the patent and the actuall machine are not quite the same. If you use the patent intellegently, examine the actuall hardware and see how it relates to the descriptions and diagrams in the patent then you'll sort it out. -tony

On 12/6/2010 9:14 PM, Brent Hilpert wrote: <snip> That simulation of the Facit 1123 is downright beautiful! It took me a bit to realize it was never going to work in Firefox, but once I switched to IE it was great. With the decimal point position set to blank, it did seem to get stuck looping in state 31 forever when I divided 1 by 3. It could also be that I have no experience whatever with this calculator and this behavior is quite normal. :-) I found it curious that the only + function is to memory, and I found the M+ and MR operation to not be intuitive but that's probably just my ignorance as well. Again, this was with the DP position blank; maybe that is just not intended or I don't understand it's purpose. I've bookmarked your website for future reference as I can envision several other uses for that simulation language. Later, Charlie C.

On 12/8/2010 8:55 AM, Rick Bensene wrote: Hi Rick, Thanks much for the explanation. I notice that the Toshiba BC-1212 has one key labeled with both + and = so I'm guessing this was pretty common in that time frame. The CM, M+ and M- do seem very intuitive to me as long as the DP switch is not set to blank. BTW, my bad on Firefox, as I had failed to restart it after downloading and installing Shockwave. After a restart the simulation works just fine with Firefox. Later, Charlie C.

On 2010 Dec 8, at 6:55 AM, Rick Bensene wrote: Thanks for filling in all that, Rick. I'll just add that in these discrete and SSI-based machines there were lots of boundary and exception conditions which would have required more physical logic, complexity and expense to account for, so the designers frequently didn't do so. (The specifics of the DP switch are that it would have required a couple more NAND gates to provide another DP alignment point to fill the 6th position on the switch .. perhaps a 5-position switch wasn't available. In the 6th 'blank' position, the state machine is looping, looking for a match signal that never comes, as it tries to align the number to the unspecified decimal point position.) A few weeks ago IIRC, Roger Holmes was touching on this issue of building gate-level simulations for diagnosis and repair of complex old machines, in relation to his mainframe. I just have to emphasize again how effective it can be, not necessarily for all classes of problems, but for some/those that are buried deep in the logic. With the schematic in hand, make observations and measurements on the physical target, make your conjectures from those observed symptoms, and then hack around in the simulation to try to get the same symptoms. Iterate as necessary. Lots of fun and can save a lot of hassle and avoid messing up the original hardware.

What I would trty to do in the latter case is make the spindle and fingers separately (the latter having a hole for the spindle, of course) and then fix then together using either setscres, solder (soft solder or silver solder) or loctite. Not having seen the machine I don't know if this is possible, of course. Indeed yse. As I read someehwere the comment 'I've checked every darn compoennt in the <foo> circuit and I can;tfindanything wrong' should imply (assuming that the tests are valid) that hte problem is not in the <foo> circuit but elsewhere. And that is a step forward. I wonder if it was ever available outside the factory, thohgh (some companies did not release service manuls :-(). Or if it contained full schematics or if it was what I generally call a 'boardswapper guide'. HP cdesktop cacluator service manuals are invariably the latter which has caused me to spend many hours with a contiuity tester, pen and paper... -tony