Imaging And Emulating An HP-IB Disk Drive

June 20, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 26 Comments

If you look on the back of old, old test equipment, you’ll find a weird-looking connector that’s either labeled IEEE-488, GPIB, or HP-IB. It’s a very old interface designed by HP for their test equipment, and it was licensed to other manufacturers for everything from power supplies to logic analyzers. Hewlett-Packard also made computers and workstations once upon a time, and it’s no surprise this interface also made it into these boxes. They even had external hard drives that operated over the HP-IB interface.

[Chris] has a few of these old computers, and wanted to see if he could emulate one of these HP-IB hard drives. There is a project to emulate these hard drives, but the electrical connection is a bit tricky; you need an IEEE-488 card, and those really aren’t made anymore.

Nevertheless, [Chris] found an old ISA IEEE-488 last year, and installed it in the PC system he’s using for all his retro explorations. After getting the card and cable to fit in the case of his PC, [Chris] connected a real HP-IB disk to his modern computer running HPDrive, made an image, and connected an old HP 150 computer. The image was read by the HP 150, and [Chris] had a vintage computer running off an emulated drive.

Circuit Plotting With An HP Plotter

January 18, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 13 Comments

Over the last few years we’ve seen a few commercial products that aim to put an entire PCB fab line on a desktop. As audacious as that sounds, there were a few booths showing off just that at CES last week, with one getting a $50k check from some blog. [Connor] and [Feiran] decided to do the hacker version of a PCB printer: an old HP plotter converted to modern hardware with a web interface with a conductive ink pen.

The plotter in question is a 1983 HP HIPLOT DMP-29 that was, like all old HP gear, a masterpiece of science and engineering. These electronics were discarded (preserved may be a better word) and replaced with modern hardware. The old servo motors ran at about 1.5A each, and a standard H-Bridge chip and beefy lab power supply these motors were the only part of the original plotter that were reused. For accurate positioning, a few 10-turn pots were duct taped to the motor shafts and fed into the ATMega1284p used for controlling the whole thing.

One of the more interesting aspects of the build is the web interface. This is a small JavaScript app that is capable of drawing lines on the X and Y axes and sends the resulting coordinates from a server to the printer. It’s very cool, but not as cool as the [Connor] and [Feiran]’s end goal: using existing Gerber files to draw some traces. They’re successfully parsing Gerber files, throwing out all the superfluous commands (drills, etc), and plotting them in conductive ink.

The final iteration of hardware wasn’t exactly what [Connor] and [Feiran] had in mind, but that’s mostly an issue with the terrible conductivity of the conductive ink. They’ve tried to fix this by running the pen over each line five times, but that introduces some backlash. This is the final project for an electrical engineering class, so we’re going to say that’s alright.

Video below.

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XOXO For The OCXO

July 3, 2014 by Adam Fabio 7 Comments

HPocxo

[Kerry Wong] recently got himself a frequency counter. Not just any counter, a classic Hewlett-Packard 5350B Microwave Counter. This baby will go 10Hz all the way up to 20GHz with only one input shift. A true fan of Hackaday Prize judge [Dave Jones], [Kerry] didn’t turn it on, he took it apart. In the process, he gave us some great pictures of late 80’s vintage HP iron.

Everything seemed to be in relatively good working order, with the exception of the oven indicator, which never turned off. The 5350B had three time bases available: a Thermally Compensated Crystal Oscillator (TCXO), an Oven Controlled Crystal Oscillator (OCXO), and a high stability OCXO. [Kerry’s] 5350B had option 001, the OCXO. Considering it was only a $750 USD upgrade to the 5350B’s $5500 USD base price, it’s not surprising that many 5350B’s in the wild have this option.

[Kerry] checked the wattage of his 5350B, and determined that it pulled about 27 watts at power up and stayed there. If the OCXO was working, wattage would have dropped after about 10 minutes when the oven came up to temperature. Time to tear open an oven!

Armed with a copy of the 5350B service manual from HP’s website, [Kerry] opened up his OCXO. The Darlington transistors used as heaters were fine. The control circuit was fine. The problem turned out to be a simple thermal fuse. The service manual recommended jumping out the fuse for testing. With the fuse jumped, the oven came to life. One more piece of classic (and still very useful) test equipment brought back to full operation.

[via Dangerous Prototypes]

Rebuilding A Custom IC Saves HP Pulse Generator

April 21, 2014 by Adam Fabio 38 Comments

Rebuilding an HP Custom IC [Matthew] got himself into a real pickle. It all started when he was troubleshooting a broken Hewlett Packard 8007A pulse generator. While trying to desolder one of the integrated circuits, [Matthew] accidentally cracked it. Unfortunately, the chip was a custom HP Pulse shaper IC – not an easy part to source by any means. That broken chip began a 5 year mission: to explore strange new repair methods. To seek out new life for that HP 8007A. To boldy fix what no one had fixed before.

[Matthew’s] first repair attempt was to build a drop in replacement for the HP chip. He took a look at the block diagram, and realized the chip was just some simple logic gates. He built his version with a small PCB and Fairchild TinyLogic gates. Unfortunately, the TinyLogic series is fast CMOS, while HP’s original chip used Emitter-coupled Logic (ECL). Thanks to the wildly different voltage levels of the two logic families, this design had no chance of working.

Five years later, [Matthew] was going to school at MIT, and had access to a wire bonding machine. He rebuilt the package using some epoxy, and managed to re-run the various bond wires. While everything looked promising, this attempt was also a failure. After all that work, the chip was blown.

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