Quick teardown: NI GPIB-232CV-A

[c4757p]

Not the most exciting teardown in the world, but I wanted to investigate whether it would be easy to modify, so I had to (don't turn it on!) take it apart. Here's a quick teardown of a National Instruments GPIB-232CV-A GPIB to RS-232 adapter for anybody who is interested.

[TerraHertz]

It's amazing NI would use all that circuitry, in a device that can only talk to one target.

Btw, do this search on ebay: hp 59401a
A HP-IB bus system analyzer, plenty of them around. Old fashioned, but cool.

[c4757p]

Yeah. The ASIC in particular seems to be huge overkill for just pushing data around. GPIB isn't that complicated.

But it is nice that the whole thing is pretty much ready to be repurposed. The ROM is an OTP 27C256 - I was hoping that it would be pin-compatible with the 28C256 EEPROM, but the bastards swapped VPP/WE and A14. Shouldn't be hard to make it fit, though. Not sure whether I want to do that or just throw in an AVR. On one hand, I like the idea of keeping the hardware unmodified; on the other hand, it's a frickin' GPIB converter from around 2000, not a priceless antique, and I could get the firmware written much faster on a mega328 with which I'm familiar...

The 59401A definitely looks cool. Anything with a bank of binary input switches on the front panel immediately gains cool points... But I think this will be one of the very few times I can look at a piece of test equipment and say "nope, I don't need this!"