Subject: RE: HP 80 Series software

From: "Peter Brown" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue Jun 3 11:04:17 2003

Hi Joe,

>I'd like get a copy if you have it. I'm running into a couple of
>oddities when I try to operate it. It's working but not the way that I
>expected and I don't know if I'm doing something wrong or what.

I remember being slightly confused by the operation of the bus analyser too.
It didn't really seem to make sense to me for some operations - I was never 
sure if it was broken or that was just the way it worked.
I think that these things tend to be a little flaky / sensitive - I ended up 
constructing a single analyser that sort of worked from three analysers that 
didn't.

>Steve Robertson ran into the same problem when he tried to use it to
>study the disk operation as part of writing an OS for the HP 1000. He did
>get some usefull info but only 32 bytes of it!

That's right, the internal memory buffer in the bus analyser is only 32 
bytes.
You can either set it up to store 32 bytes from the bus or (I think), if you 
have the patience, you can manually (in binary) store 32 bytes in the memory 
and then have the analyser clock them out onto the bus.

>I'm currently investigating another option.
>NI make a GPIB+ card (ISA or PCI) that acts as both a GPIB controller and a 
>...
>codes.  I'll let you know how I get on.

I've now had a chance to take a look at the NI GPIB+ cards in some detail.  
With the proviso that these cards only work under Windows 98 se or earlier 
and windows NT, they seem to be an excellent solution to seeing what is 
going on on an HPIB bus.
The software can be set up to monitor all events on the HPIB bus, control 
lines, data lines, control words, data words etc.  The card can also be set 
up to passively monitor the bus and add time stamps to the captured bus 
events.
The only limitation to the number of events that can be stored in a capture 
file appears to be how much memory/disk space the capture machine has.
The capture files can be exported in a text format and dumped into Word / 
Excel for further processing.

>I have (had?) a card like that but NI no longer supports it and I
>haven't been able to find any docs or software for it.

If the card is a GPIB+ Controller/Analyser then the software is available 
for NT / Win98 - you need version 1.7 of the GPIB controller software from 
the NI website.

>I have something else that might be usefull. It's Bus Analyzer module
>made by HP that works with one of their logic analyzers. You plug the LA
>pods directly into it (no wire leads) and it has sockets for RS-232, HP-IB
>and one or two other standard interfaces. With it you can use a LA to grab
>the data, disaasemble it (if you have the the disassembler), save it, send
>it to a computer, etc. I've never tried to use it since I don't have the LA
>(HP 1631 IIRC) that it works with.

For me, after looking at the GPIB+ card it seems to be a 100% solution - I 
am very impressed with it - only the slightly ageing software lets it down.

Peter

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