Hp1660c lan option.

[Weistek]

This may fall under the repair sub forum but I'm not repairing anything yet.

I was curious if anyone had the schematics for this option and or had one they were willing to let go of?

I can't seem to find much on it. I'll do some more googling but I was just curious if anyone had any info on it. Also any interesting mods for this one? I know it's ancient but I like old equipment

Sent from my SM-G920T using Tapatalk

[sleary78]

I just bought one. Plugged it in and no joy.

I can tell you its option E2472A LAN Upgrade

Photos to follow

[sleary78]

[sleary78]

It looks like a v simple circuit but I haven’t confirmed it working in a unit. It’s also an arse to install

[sleary78]

Also it’s integrated with the keyboard, mouse and parallel port ... so it’s unlikely anyone will part with theirs. But recreation is possible

[sleary78]

Ok. I finally got this working. For anyone needing to do this here is the process.

1. Install the "new" IO Board (i.e. the module i posted a pic above.
2. If you havent got 8Mb of RAM already then upgrade the 72 pin SIMM to 8Mbyte (needed for LAN option)
3. Download the software to a floppy and reflash.

Step 3 is essential. It reconfigures the hardware based on the LAN option being detected.

Have fun.

[Copeland]

Any luck in ducplication the LAN option shown here?

Does any of you know where to get the software of the HP1660C? My Hard drive died.

Best Regards, Robert

[guenthert]

[..]
Does any of you know where to get the software of the HP1660C? My Hard drive died.

Best Regards, Robert

Mine just died as well (~20 years is apparently longer than one can expect those cheap IDE drives to last -- wonder whether that might also be depend on whether the drive was running when the LA was tilted on its feet ...), before I had a chance to make a back-up (just acquired the unit) 

Not a big deal, as the unit happily runs w/o a HDD (system is thankfully ROM-resident).  It's convenient to have though and I'm going to try my luck with a CF adapter (got the card and adapter, need now however an adapter to convert HDD style power plug into a Floppy style power plug 

There's a fellow who sells a set of system image floppies: https://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-1660-61-62-63C-CS-Logic-Analyzer-Operating-System-Software/254546619661?hash=item3b44292d0d:g:QPwAAOSwrcZedWIT

Keysight also still offers the system software for (free  ) download on their support site.  Question remains on how to get those images on the HDD.  I don't want to deal with floppies in the 3rd millennia.

There must be a way to write it using a Linux PC ...  I found a hint that the OS of the LA uses a MS-DOS (FAT) file system on the internal HDD, albeit byte-swapped and with an unusually large blocksize of 16384B.  Neither the msdos file system of the Linux kernel, nor the user space MTOOLS like that. 

I decided to bump up the MAX_SECTOR macro in msdos.h in the mtools sources, recompile and add following entry to the system-wide config file (/etc/mtools.conf):

Code: [Select]

# HP1662C disk image
drive h: file="/var/tmp/hp1662c.img" swap # blocksize=16384
(it turns out, with the MAX_SECTOR adjusted, the blocksize is correctly auto-detected and doesn't need to be set).
et viola, the mtools work on a disk image of a HP 166x (quite possibly also on HP 167x).

EDIT:
Actually above was entirely too optimistic.  Turns out that there's a MAX_BOOT (why?) which needs to be adjusted as well in order to be able to format the image using the given sector size (otherwise the tool happily overwrites its own memory and segfaults -- if the sector size isn't explicitly given, 0 is calculated, which leads to a floating point exception when copying to that image).  But that's just the beginning.  There's a heuristic in place, which determines that a FAT32 fs is to be formatted (while it ought to be FAT16) ...
Those floppies look awfully appealing now 

EDIT2:
FWIW, I eventually succeeded by formatting the CF disk (which is at 512MB slightly smaller than the 540MB of the original HDD) using the LA.  This yielded a fs which now has a sector size of 8192B, which happens to be the maximum sector size the mtools support.  I was then able to use those mtools to copy the files from zip archive from keysight onto the CF.

[sleary78]

Its pretty easy to get these going apparently...

https://www.jamiecraig.com/hp1661cs-ethernet-interface/

Needs an 8Mb Simm installed and updated firmware to SYSTEM.LAN