DEC RK07 drive interface specs wanted

From: Tony Duell <ard_at_p850ug1.demon.co.uk>
Date: Tue May 18 18:39:28 2004

> It's also worth pointing out that by the '80s, some of the boards
> required diagnostics and equipment that it wasn't practical for every

Hmm... I suspect I could find most common faults, and fix them, with the
tools I take to HPCC meetings. This is a fairly small toolkit (contents :
scrrewdrivers from 0.8mm to 8mm, nutdrivers, allen keys, torx keys,
tempertature controlled soldering iron, solder sucker, solder wick,
pliers, strippers, cutters, pin vice, spanners (AF, BA, metric) Leatherman
tool, logicdart, DMM)

> field service guy to carry. A lot of companies did as the one I worked
> for: field service engineers were trained (quite carefully) to pin a

That word 'trained' always worries me. You can't train somebody to do
faultfinding in my experience (just as you can't train people to be good
electronic designers, or musical composers, or...). Yes, there are things
you have to know, but beyond that, you have to have experience, and
really understand what's going on. This is _not_ what you get from the
service training course from what I've read.

> problem down to a board, replace that, and send the faulty one to their
> central workshop (ours was in Stoke) where it would be repaired and
> tested. There's nothing wrong with swapping a board providing you know
> which to swap (implying "why", at some level) and the faulty one gets

Problem with that is that to really _know_ which module to swap you have
to have really found the fault, almost to component level. And as we all
know, it's finding the fault that takes the time. Soldering in a
replacement chip -- even an SMD one -- takes only a few minutes at most.

> fixed (assuming it's economic).

-tony
Received on Tue May 18 2004 - 18:39:28 BST