A new piece of equipment!

I have been looking for a piece of equipment that is like a mixed signal oscilloscope, but more configurable, accurate and has a good price.  I was loosing hope when  I stumbled upon a used logic analyzer mainframe chassis on eBay while researching.

I noticed that the HP 16500 series mainframe, particularly the C model was exactly what I was looking for.  I began searching eBay frequently and doing research on the card configurations I was interested in.  Friday last week, I saw a C model chassis with the exact set of cards I was looking for and bought it.  The mainframe arrived Just yesterday!  Here is a picture of it below:

HP 16500 C

The mainframe actually came with a 4 GHz Timing / 1 GHz State logic analyzer card and the matching expansion card for it.  If you are using all 32 channels it will drop to 2 GHz timing mode.
The 4 GHz timing mode is enabled for 16 channels though, which is amazing.  The best thing about this is that I was able to buy it with all the pods as you can see below.

Logic Pods

The system software loaded to the hard drive also includes the symbol utility, which when combined with the inverse assembler is very powerful indeed.  Bill Buzbee used the inverse assembler and a HP Logic Mainframe to debug his homebrew CPU Magic!

There are still 3 more empty slots in the mainframe, I plan on getting a few more cards to allow me to cross trigger scopes and a pattern generator.  You can connect the C model to the local area network via a cat 5 cable.  This allows you to FTP into the machine and transfer files, mount the device as an NFS share, TELNET into it and give it direct commands, or even connect to the console via X Windows as a client.  The current configuration of the mainframe is visible in the picture below.

Current Configuration

I decided to test out the logic analyzer and pods on a current side project.  Below you can see what the waveform view from the logic analyzer looks like.

Waveform Screen

That's all for now, have fun everyone!