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General => General Technical Chat => Topic started by: bullet308 on February 26, 2013, 01:51:53 pm

Title: Tektronix 1230 Logic Analyzer Battery Replacement
Post by: bullet308 on February 26, 2013, 01:51:53 pm

Hi:

Have one of these units that I am prepping for resale. It passes all POSTs fine except for the onboard battery. When I pop the top cover off, I see two coin cells on one of the main boards, which is fine but the board also has silk-screened on it a warning about referring it to a service tech for battery replacement. I am concerned that the batteries preserve critical calibration data and that the batteries have to be swapped in a specific sequence or some such, but I have been unable to locate any instructions for this online.

Anybody out there know about how to swap the batteries in one of these things?

Thanks
-Tom

Title: Re: Tektronix 1230 Logic Analyzer Battery Replacement
Post by: mdanh2002 on November 10, 2014, 03:26:59 pm

Hi,

It's sad to see that nobody has replied you after a year! Unfortunately that is usually the case for questions on these types of vintage machines.

I have a Tektronix 1230 logic analyzer myself, and the battery is also dead. I know what you're referring to - it's the message CAUTION: REFER BATTERY REPLACEMENT TO QUALIFIED TECHNICIAN printed on the circuit board. I replaced them nevertheless, not in any specific order, and the unit still seems to work just fine. So you can just proceed to replace yours.

The battery is only to keep the RTC clock settings (which has some kind of Y2K issues - setting 2014 as the year and you'll see 1914 after a reboot), the various channel, probe and acquisition settings (all of which can be configured from the menu), as well as the capture memory samples (2k data points I believe).

You can see a detailed review of the unit here on my blog:
http://minhdanh2002.blogspot.sg/2014/10/tektronix-1230-logic-analyzer.html (http://minhdanh2002.blogspot.sg/2014/10/tektronix-1230-logic-analyzer.html)

See also this article on how I managed to develop a simple tool to capture the printer output from this logic analyzer parallel port, store on the SD card and converted it back to a bitmap file for viewing:
http://minhdanh2002.blogspot.sg/2014/02/capturing-data-from-tektronix-1230.html (http://minhdanh2002.blogspot.sg/2014/02/capturing-data-from-tektronix-1230.html)

Title: Re: Tektronix 1230 Logic Analyzer Battery Replacement
Post by: free_electron on November 10, 2014, 03:37:04 pm

simply swap the battery when the machine is running. these things always have a current steering diodes.