HP 1661A logic Anlayser and Gotek HxC hookup

[reggs]

I have an old (1980's) HP 1661A Logic Analyser (its part of the HP 1660 series) of Logic Analysers and I was hoping to swap out the Floppy Drive.
I'm using a flashed HxC Gotek drive.

The floppy is an Epson SMD 1000 (SMD 1040-318-01, N11103). The analyser can format and write standard MSDOS 3.25" DSDD floppies and I can read
them on my Windows 7 PC's USB floppy drive fine.

This SMD1000 drive model however, does not have a 4 pin power connector at all, just the standard 34-pin IDC connector.
I probed all 34 pins and the pinout seems to be very different to a normal connector (See my results below).

Looking through these forums and the list of supported drives I can see that the SMD 1000 is supported on the 'GEM WX-Expander', however that SMD1000
unit does have the 4 pin power connector. As the power supplied to the drive appears to be very different to normal, I have not connected up the emulator as yet.

My question is can I just connect up the emulator or will I need different firmware?
There is an 8 pin jumper block on the top of the drives motherboard, with most pins jumpered. Again not in a conventional manner either.
I can post pics but given someone has probably done this already I was hoping that someone could help me out.

I would like to avoid 'magic smoke' coming from anything

Any help appreciated!

Epson SMD 1040-318-01
N11103

Pinout (34-pin IDC connector)
------

Pin
1
3
5
7 5v
9 5v
11 5v
13 Ground
15 Ground
17 Ground
19 Ground
21 Ground
23 Ground
25 Ground
27 Ground
29 Ground
31 Ground
33 Ground

Pin
2 5v
4 5v
6
8 5v
10
12
14
16
18
20
22
24
26 5v
28 5v
30 5v
32
34 5v

[reggs]

Okay so as I've had no replies so I dug out an old 3.25 PC drive in order to see if I could get the HP Logic Analyser to
recognise that as a first step. I also found this article where someone (davorin) had managed to get another HP Logic Analyser the 16500A working with a PC floppy.
http://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/h ... b-upgrade/
I believe the pinout is almost fully Shugart so I followed his wiring and jumpered the drive in as follows:

Drive connections to PC floppy drive.
Power
-----
7, +5V Connected to 5v connection on PC floppy 4 pin power connector
9 - +5V but not connected
11 - +5V but not connected
13, 15, 17, 19, 21, 23, 25, 27, 29, 31, 33 - GND, I've connected pin 33 to Ground on the 4 pin power connector

Analyser cable - PC floppy drive:
2 - Connected to pin 34
4 - 4 /BUSY
6 - open
8 - 8 /INDEX
10 - 12 /DRIVE1
12 - open
14 - open
16 - 16 /MOTOR1
18 - 18 /DIR
20 - 20 /STEP
22 - 22 /WDATA
24 - 24 /WGATE
26 - 26 /TRK00
28 - 28 /WPT
30 - 30 /RDATA
32 - 32 /SIDE1

Same as him the PC floppy now powers on at boot up, the LED illuminates and I can hear the heads seeking but the Analyser will not read the disk.
It just says 'Unsupported Format' on screen and fails it startup test, but at least I have no 'magic smoke' coming from the drive.

Unfortunately I'm a floppy disk noob so I'm not sure what to try next
Any ideas anyone ?

Original floppy drive Epson SMD1000

2015-12-07 09.12.04.jpg (147.12 KiB) Viewed 16749 times

PC drive on top of HP 1661A analyser

2015-12-08 08.22.02.jpg (145.54 KiB) Viewed 16749 times

Jumpered PC floppy to Analyser

2015-12-08 08.21.14.jpg (185.33 KiB) Viewed 16749 times

[reggs]

Rear connections SMD1000

2015-12-07 09.11.08.jpg (128.86 KiB) Viewed 16749 times

[jwpgroup]

Reggs

take a look at the HP4145B thread in this section.

It sounds like your drive is the same/similar to mine (I'm trying to sort a HP1650A) which has a MP-F52W-30 (as do those mentioned in that thread).

I've got the emulator installed correctly with the detail in that thread (I'm pretty sure of that), just not having much luck with the files needed to boot it

Best

John

[ralph]

Did you ever get this working ? I have a HP1660a which i would very much like to replace the floppy .... (uses the smd1000 floppy).

[reggs]

Yes the emulator works but not the one I had originally (in 2015).
Its a very long while since I used it but I was not able to use a flashed 3.5" drive.

I was able to get the HP1661A working after purchasing the REV C - HXC SD and using some floppy images that Jean-François supplied me with.
It works absolutely fine with that but only with SD images. I was unable to get DD disk images working so gave up with them.
The HXC SD sits on top of the analyser like the in pictures.
I sent this email in but never got a response that helped me out but by then I was kind of done with the project so gave up.

EMAIL DEC 2015:
Hi - I have managed to make a larger image by creating a 3.5" 2.50MB DSDD
disk and it does work partially.

The problem is that the Analyser can read and write to an image created
in this manner ok, however
when I create an image and add files to it with HxCFloppyEmulator the
analyser can't see those files.

HxCFloppyEmulator can see files that the Analyser writes to the HFE
image, but only if I have written some files to the HFE file first, even though the Anlayser cannot see them.

When I look at the image both sets of files show up in
HxCFloppyEmulator, but dragged and dropped files do not show up on the
Analyser.

Any thoughts on how I can drag and drop files with HxCFloppyEmulator and
have the analyser see them ?
------------------END EMAIL---------------

[Jeff]

I sent this email in but never got a response that helped me out but by then I was kind of done with the project so gave up.

And in fact you got an answer to this email. I still waiting for the test result

[reggs]

Hi Jeff, your response was to use the images you'd sent me, which of course was what I was already doing. That is quite clear in my note.

It maybe a misunderstanding on my part but as I said the larger image didn't work.
How was that unclear?