torsdag den 1. januar 2015

Progress! Lack of progress! TESTGEAR!

So It's been a while. Been doing some RF projects for ham radio the last months, and been a bit out of the loop with the microcomputers. Until my interest was sparked by a piece of test gear:

I got a logic analyzer! Thurlby (Tti) LA4800 48CH. logic analyzer!
It was fairly cheap, even though it lacks the probes. The thurlby analyzers uses these pods with IDC connectors, which basically just contains some input protection and some buffers. It says in the manual that you really just COULD connect wires directly to the input connectors, but there is NO input protection what so ever. they feed right into some standard 7400-logic buffers and some SIP resistors for pullup(down?), so if you feed it a smidgen more than 5V, you burn those (at best). Probes are coming along nicely, probably done by tomorrow (might make an update on them). 

The interface is really nice, it's intuitive, took me ½ an hour without manual to get a basic understanding of it. It does both timing and state analysis, and also has an external clock input.

It comes with some nice sets of default settings; 8 bit computer
being one of the better. Pictured is some banks of test data it had.

The hardware seems dated 1992- design is probably late 80's early 90's. 

The main board is almost entirely trough-hole, the only smd stuff being the LCD drivers on the module. 

Most chips are 7400-series, with some nice big RAM for the datalogging. processor(s), yes, it has two, each associated with an eprom and some more ram; I'm suspecting one set is purely for the RS432 communications. Anyway, processors are Hitachi HD6303 processor.

The display has wonderful contrast, even contrast and brightness setting. 

Truly a very neat bit of gear.