Logic analyzers are the “super-oscilloscope” of digital hardware development. The logic analyzer was a major character in Tracy Kidder’s book Soul of a New Machine.
The previous few lines are a quote from The Art of Electronics. I know that there are a lot of people who don’t like that book but I do. I also happen to like Soul of a New Machine. Maybe you read them, maybe you don’t, but I am not going to talk about those books.
I want to talk about the HP 16500B that a certain someone sold to me (thank you again).
Calling a 16500 a “logic analyzer” is doing it a disservice. Its official name is much more apt: Logic Analysis System Mainframe.
One of the nice things about the 16500B is that it has got an hard disk. I know that it probably is a time bomb (I could replace it with a compact flash) but it is much faster than using floppy disk to start the system.
A mainframe all alone isn’t really useful. It is then very lucky that its slots are all full with:
- 16554A – 70/100 MHz LA Module, 68 Channels, 500 KSample Buffer
- 16530A – 400 MSample/sec (MS/sec) Timebase
- 16531A – 100 MHz Digital Storage Oscilloscope, two channels, 6 bit, 4 KSample buffers
- 16520A – 50 Mbps Pattern Generator, 12 channels
- 16521A – Pattern Generator Expansion Card
The goodies doesn’t end here. It has also got the module 16500H: a 10Base-T interface. Which means that I got ftp, nfs and x-windows.
If you are curious, you can find a lot of photographs of 16500B and a lot of web pages that explain the history of this instrument.
There are also a lot of web pages that tell how to connect the 16500B to a pc running GNU/Linux.
I just want to point out that to connect the 16500B to a machine running CAELinux, you have to edit the /etc/X11/xinit/xserverrc file and add xserver-allow-tcp=true in the [SeatDefaults] section of /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf
Connecting a 16500B to a machine running Solaris 10 is even easier than that: you just run
svccfg -s x11-server setprop options/tcp_listen = true
and you are set.
Obviously you still need to setup the correct IP address on the 16500B and you need to run xhost.
Sadly I haven’t been able to load the 16500B fonts under Solaris 10 which means that the 16500B complains when it is opening the display.
It is even sadder that it won’t show the oscilloscope traces neither under Solaris 10 nor CAELinux. It is not a big problem: you just save the screen on the 16500B disk as a color TIFF and then you use a ftp client to get it.
And now the time has come to tackle a lot of projects that needed a logic analyzer and become proficient in the use of my 16500B.
A.Cicuta
