Small Soldering, but not too small.

I had to use the microscope for these, but they were all done with chisel tip pencil iron.

SIOC8 / SOP8, marker for scale

Close Up with Microscope

Another SIOC8 / SOP8, marker for scale.

Close Up with Microscope

LQFP64, marker for scale.

Close Up with Microscope.

Eventual Carrier board for testing.

A Replacement for my HP 16500A

Recently I decided to upgrade some of my test equipment.  I purchased an Agilent / HP 16702B model analyzer mainframe.  This "new" analyzer can make use of several of the cards from my HP 16500C analyzer.  I cleaned off the outside of the analyzer and the touch screen with Windex.  The lower front corner of the mainframe chassis was bent, so I took it partially apart and bent the corner back.  Now the front panel sits properly on the chassis.  The picture below shows the analyzer after I got the corner fixed and panels back on.

Analyzers in the middle of switch out and repairs.

I put my 500 MHz oscilloscope and 500 MHz logic analyzer cards into the new analyzer, hooked up the keyboard and mouse and booted the analyzer.  As it turns out everything worked except the keyboard and mouse.  I had to modify the PS/2 controller board to add some resistors to make the keyboard and mouse work.  The pictures below show the board that I modified.

Original Board (solder in empty pads)

Solder cleaned out of empty pads.

PS/2 Pull-up Resistors (1 kΩ) Added.

After that modification, the keyboard and mouse worked great.  Now that the keyboard works, I could interrupt the boot process on the 16702B and change some configuration parameters.  The picture below shows the analyzer outputting it's screen to a nice 23 inch LED flat panel monitor.

Analyzer Mainframes all working again.

I was also able to find a way to enable all the options for this analyzer as long as I don't use it for commercial purposes.  This analyzer is way more complicated than the previous model, so I will need some time to adjust to it and be able to utilize all the features properly.  The pictures below are screen captures of me playing around with the analyzer.

Testing Scope using signal generator.

Testing logic analyzer and scope with uart data.

That's all for now, I need to finish routing a board I am working on.

HP 16500 C Hard Disk Upgrade

I decided to take the time to upgrade the hard drive in my HP 16500 C model mainframe test instrument.  I was able to find a very helpful information on a few sites. Such as the K04BB Wiki, OpenGPIB, KD8TBD's Blog, and Philip Pemberton's website.  This helped me decide to try the upgrade of the hard drive to a compact flash card.  I purchased a StarTech Adapter, BR &TD 256 Meg Compact Flash card, and a SanDisk 512 Meg Compact Flash card.  I also purchased a SD card to IDE adapter, to experiment and try.

After I unhooked the IDE drive and hooked up the SD card adapter the hard disk test failed on boot, as expected.

hard disk boot test failure.

The SD card adapter and SD card was recognized by the mainframe, but it timed out while trying to format.  You can (sort of) see that I have it hooked up in the picture below.  The fact that it tried to format the SD card as a drive was promising.  I really thought it might work, but it timed out, then locked up. Failure!  That's okay, I still had the Compact Flash card adapter to try out.

SD Card adapter experiment.

I unhooked the SD Card adapter and hooked up the Compact Flash card adapter.  

Compact Flash adapter experiment.

The mainframe recognized the "hard drive" again and this time actually formatted it!  Success!  Immediately I started copying over the Operating System files for the mainframe and the test files.  

Copying Files to Compact Flash "Hard Drive".

Once the files were all copied over, it was time to reboot the mainframe.  I removed the floppy disk that it booted the machine and reset the power button.  Just as I hoped, there was a passing hard drive test.  

Passing Hard Drive boot test.

The mainframe booted into the OS from the compact flash card, I ran all the tests and they passed.  Now all I had to do was tidy up the install of the compact flash adapter and button up the mainframe. 

Compact Flash Adapter installed.

Once the adapter was securely attached to the same location that the original hard drive was, I put all the covers back on.  This last picture is the HP 16500 C mainframe running off the new "hard drive" while the old hard drive is sitting next to it.  I never actually tested to see if the SanDisk Compact Flash card would format and work.

Mainframe with old hard drive out.