Hi Abdul and Group, I'm beginning to feel like I am a manic depressive.. I keep going from the lowest lows to the highest highs...
Well things are pretty high right now. Here's how I got there: First, I took my Prologix adapter apart to have a look see under the microscope. ... Abdul probably won't speak to me ever again after I describe what I did... But I'm an engineer. I can't help myself. It's in my genes. In looking the board over over, I discovered that one of the data pins on the GPIB connector was bent out of line where it passed into the board. A classic sign of solder blocked hole that prevented the pin from passing through the board and getting soldered. This is it, I thought. The pin even wiggled funny. So I needed to take the thumb screws out and get to the bottom side of the board and repair the joint. Well, Abdul obviously didn't want me to do that, as he epoxied a nut onto each screw to keep it retained... a little over kill there Abdul. I like that! If you ever run into something like this, your soldering iron can be your friend... that and a little patience. I heated the nut until it was smoking hot, and screwed the thumb screw right out... Sounds much easier than it really was... That's where the patience part comes in. After I got the board out, I discovered something odd, the pin that was bent up stuck through the board enough so that Abdul had clipped off the excess after soldering the board. Hmmm? Well, I sucked out the joint, straightened the pin, resoldered it, and tested the silly thing anyway... Hope springs eternal, as they say. It worked! My 7854 was up and running, and being controlled, and all of that really neat stuff, and t h e n, i t w a s i g n o r i n g e v e r y t h i n g t h a t I s e n t t o i t... Damn! We are hitting one of those lows again. So, I plugged my trusty HP85B into the scope, and tried to control the scope, and ... it didn't work either! It's getting a little hard for me to escape the conclusion that there is something wrong with my scope, and it's an intermittent too... I love problems that are intermittent. They allow me to waste inordinate amounts of time, speak new swear words I don't usually use.. All that kind of stuff that makes it feel good to be a man. The first place I decided to look was the 7854's GPIB connector, since the problem seemed to have something to do with exercising the connector. When I got the connector where I could see it, I noticed that Tektronix committed a major fooboo with this connector. They needed it to stick out from the board a little bit further than the solder tails would allow, so they checked to see that nobody was looking, and just soldered the pads with the solder tails somewhat below the surface... Not a great recipe for success... Or as someone once said it was one of those things that puts the suck in success. I sucked out all of the joints, and made triple damn sure that the new joints were getting properly wetted with solder, and made a little fillet on the other side of the board, and tried things out...and... It works!!! Remember what I said about manic-depressive? Well this is one of those high times. It seems to be ok. Now we just have to let it run for a while. With any luck at all, it will work long enough that I will completely forget I ever went through this series of events. Hopefully I can keep this mess running until I get my Tektronix 547 transformer core experiments finished, my report written, some pretty pictures made, and a couple of transformers rewound.... We'll see. Thanks Abdul for providing me with such good entertainment! -Chuck Harris Prologix wrote: > Hi Chuck, > > Please make sure the adapter is properly seated. Also, see if using a GPIB > cable makes a difference. > > If you are still having trouble I am happy to send you a replacement unit. > > Regards, > Abdul > > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On > Behalf Of Chuck Harris > > > This is beginning to look more and more like I have a > bad Prologix adapter. > > Oh Abdul?? > > -Chuck Harris > > _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
