Zel's Fleet Blog - BX, Jag XJ-S, Sinclair C5, Mercedes 208D & 230TE, AC Model 70.

[CitroJim]

Good progress Zel Keep us posted

[Zelandeth]

Between this thing and the fact there's a pile of bits on the way to put together a PDP 11/73 (or similar) on the way soon which I'm sure will require at least some degree of hardware debugging I've decided it's time to pull the trigger on getting a modern scope. So there's now a Rigol 1054Z on the way. Pretty old hat by today's standards, but more than capable of anything I'm likely to ask of it. About a thousand times more portable than my current setup as well and with a far less maddening UI than the equivalent products from the same period from Silent, Owon etc. Yes something with a Tek, Rode & Schwartz or HP...sorry...Agilent...no, I mean Keysight... seriously just pick a name guys...would be nice, but I'd be looking at near four figures for the same functionality and spec Vs less than £300 for a lightly used Rigol. Still very much remember being lent a 1054Z when they were still new and being absolutely blown away by what it could do, never having really used a scope with storage capabilities, never mind one with that degree of memory depth that made the features so accessible rather than being buried so deeply behind a UI that needed a degree to even begin to understand.

[Zelandeth]

Well this is sub optimal.



Turned the wipers on and was greeted with a clonk and they stopped there. Was pretty sure the E clip and washer would have made a bid for freedom and the linkage popped off the motor.

Yep. Sure enough that was exactly what had happened. I'd retrieved the linkage and propped it on the motor for the photo.



I'll go spelunking behind the shelf and see if I can find the missing bits and reassemble it tomorrow. Shouldn't be too complicated. The linkage on this has a lot of slop in it because someone did a botched job of fixing it in the past which allowed things to wear oddly, so really could do with replacement one day.

[CitroJim]

I'm still managing well with my old Telequipment S54A Zel

That Rigol is quite a beast. I had a quick look and it's not what I expected at all!

[Zelandeth]

I'm still managing well with my old Telequipment S54A Zel

That Rigol is quite a beast. I had a quick look and it's not what I expected at all!

I've got an old Hameg currently which generally does the job. However it can be a little glitchy at times, the calibration control for Ch2 doesn't work, and it weighs as much as a small moon so very rarely moves. The storage functions is has are extremely rudimentary as well.

The 1054 I still see as Rigol's first real proper fighting punch at the market, proving that you can make a perfectly decent, usable and well featured DSO at a sane price, and took the fight right to the door of the big names back when it came out around 2015 - essentially selling a new scope with everything that the majority of customers were going to need for the price of a 15 year old used scope from the big names.

They basically gave the test equipment industry a similar kick up the backside as Huawei did to the mobile communications companies (before the Americans realised they were rapidly falling behind and kicked them out of the market). Another one of those examples that home grown Chinese kit can be every bit as good as anything from the West if the company making it wants it to be. There are other companies in the field as well, Siglent and Owon being probably the best known, but to me their products have never seemed as well polished as those from Rigol though I'm sure they do the job.

I was honestly gobsmacked the first time I used one, realising how far things had come in the field since the 90s and that there was more to it than an LCD display and being lighter! Seeing the ability to decode data streams on the fly honestly broke my brain a bit.

More than happy to bring it round sometime Jim so you can have a play with it and see what your impressions are as I imagine you're a much more serious user of your test equipment than I am by several orders of magnitude.

[CitroJim]

More than happy to bring it round sometime Jim so you can have a play with it and see what your impressions are as I imagine you're a much more serious user of your test equipment than I am by several orders of magnitude.

I'd love to have a good look at it Zel!

Once again, huge thanks for yesterday

[Zelandeth]

More than happy to bring it round sometime Jim so you can have a play with it and see what your impressions are as I imagine you're a much more serious user of your test equipment than I am by several orders of magnitude.

I'd love to have a good look at it Zel!

Once again, huge thanks for yesterday

Any time, Jim. You've bailed me out more than once before as well so it's only fair!

Well I've got another pile of computer bits getting picked up tomorrow. The biggest day to day headache I have is a lack of space...so why on earth am I getting the largest (and undoubtedly heaviest) machine I have ever owned?

Not sure exactly what will be in there, but the pile will contain a QBus chassis, power supply, bunch of cards, RL-02 drive for storage, a genuine VT-100 terminal, and hopefully all the necessary spaghetti to connect it together. I just need to add a BlueSCSI or similar to make getting software onto it from the modern world less of a headache. I've been meaning to grab one of those for a while anyway as I've got a couple of other systems which have SCSI based storage and have always been a pain to backup etc as a result. Going to be a voyage into a world I've basically zero experience of before, and at the same time bringing up equipment which hasn't been used in probably 30 years. Should be interesting.

[CitroJim]

Going to be a voyage into a world I've basically zero experience of before, and at the same time bringing up equipment which hasn't been used in probably 30 years. Should be interesting.

It's going to be very interesting Zel and I'll be following this latest adventure with great interest

[Zelandeth]

New scope arrived this morning, and you could honestly have fooled me into thinking it had never been used. As new definitely would be accurate.



Only had a brief poke around, but I think I've found a likely candidate for why the PET isn't working. I don't know much about this system, but I'm pretty sure that address bus line A2 on the memory shouldn't look like this.



Wait...I don't need to faff around with taking photos of a screen here. With the press of one button I can just save a screenshot to a USB stick.



I reckon that has the potential to be a surprisingly useful feature when bug hunting. Definitely better than my own memory and half readable scribbled notes.

Today I added RL-02 drives to that list of things that look smaller (and lighter) in the photos.



That's a DEC RL-02 hard disk drive, Q-Bus chassis and a VT-100 data terminal.

First round of cards is also here.



CPU, unpopulated ROM (they're nothing esoteric and the images are readily available so I can just burn my own), memory and a SCSI controller. To follow are a serial card and RL-02 controller. This collection of bits forms the building blocks of a PDP-11/73.

The RL-02 tends to look like it's about the size of a moderately chunky desktop PC in pictures. It really isn't!



It also weighs something like 40kg, so was an absolute joy to carry upstairs.

I know I could emulate this with something this size of a matchbox these days, but where's the fun in that when you can have an actual 10Mb drive that uses 15" removable platters which probably cost more than my car when new? I WILL have a modern solution hanging off the SCSI bus to actually get software onto it in the first place though.

Chassis doesn't contain much at the moment. Just the Q-Bus backplane and another obscenely heavy power supply.



Both of these have been tucked away under the desk for now. That's a large PC for scale comparison.



The cover for the ready light is missing from the drive, not unusual. Pins moulded into that actually set the ID between 0 and 3 depending on which pins are present, so you do need that. Currently have one in the process of being 3D printed. This is definitely the sort of area where those are a huge saver of hassle.

VT-100 is still downstairs and hasn't been looked at yet. That will probably be the first bit of this puzzle to be got running as without it I'm not really be going to have any ability to interact with this thing even if I do get it to boot. Sadly we are missing the keyboard, so I'm going to have to build an adapter board to interface with that as the correct keyboard is annoyingly expensive if you can find one, as apparently they're rarer than the terminals themselves by a fair chunk.

[CitroJim]

Magic! There's a lot of fun in store for you there Zel

That 'scope looks good