Hi All,
> Yes a FEW of the HP-IB hard drives. The only drives that would work
>without specail support were the HP 9133/9134 that had a apecial option
>that made the disk look like three HP 9895 8" floppy dirves. There is a...
Sounds like it is a bit of a non-starter...
> I replied to you several times but my messages don't appear to be
>getting through. I haven't had time to set up a machine with the HP-IB card
>and install your SW.
Let me know when you get things going, the software has gone through a
number of revisions since the version I sent you. I'm now looking at an
application that first strips all the data from an HPIB disk drive dumping
it onto a PC. A second application on the PC then emulates an HPIB drive
using groups of files stored in a simple directory system on the PC.
>I've been spending a lot of time with the HP 1000s and
>with a HP-IB interfaced Speech Synthesizer that I found. (It's COOL!)
Sounds like a pretty rare piece of kit - is it a commercial Speech
Synthesizer or home-brew?
>That's taken me deeper into the HP-IB bus operation and I've had to repair
>a couple of HP 59401 HP-IB Bus Analyzers for use with that. (Anybody got a
>manual for these?)
I certainly have an operations manual, it may include some service bits and
pieces. I'll take a look when I get home to the UK.
I have a couple of these bus analysers at home, I used them in the initial
investigations for the CS80 reader. You can use them to slow down the bus
traffic on an HPIB system either to 2 transactions a second or single step.
I tried using one to investigate the traffic between a 9000 300 machine and
a disk drive but as soon as you slow the bus down the 300 series machine
complains that the disk has timess out.
Luckily I have an old HP 3562 spectrum analyser than interfaces to CS80 /
AMIGO disks. You can single step though commands with no timeout problems
using it as the disk controller.
In the end though useful the 59401 is somewhat limited in what it can do.
With the long command sequences that I was examining I ended up having to
write down each octal (Yes, OCTAL - the I lost count of the number of times
that I accidentally read the numbers as hex....) data packet as it appeared
on the bus and then go back and try to decode what it all meant.
The bus analyser also occasionally dropped the first byte of information
being sent back by the HPIB disk drive.
I'm currently investigating another option.
NI make a GPIB+ card (ISA or PCI) that acts as both a GPIB controller and a
GPIB analyser. In theory this can be set up to 'sniff' the GPIB bus and
generate a log file of each GPIB bus event (with a 50 ns time resolution).
The log can be as long as you want so no more laboriously copying down octal
codes. I'll let you know how I get on.
> I'm still looking for those blankity-blank manuals! Don't know where I
>put them. I found a set of paper back manauls of the same thing.
I don't need the manuals straight away. I'm hoping they contain some info
about HP-UX file formats (and general HP-UX stuff - I have no experience
with HP-UX systems)
>Did the other manuals arrive yet?
I haven't seen them yet but it's a few days since anyone checked my mail for
me.
Cheers
Peter Brown
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Received on Mon Jun 02 2003 - 10:30:01 BST