HP82169A usefull in anno 2022?

[floppy]

Hello,
since I see few people are cleaning their storage (then selling in eBay), what would be the use of that device?
I know, with HP-IL and PILBOX and PCs and Nov64d and .. we are quite happy. However, any use of these original device could be of interest.
Regards.

[Sylvain Cote]

Remember that interface loop (HP-IL) is the serial version of the HP interface bus. (HP-IB, IEEE-488)
For a very long time, HP-IB was the primary remote control interface for electronic equipments.
I have multimeters, power supply, data acquisition units, etc that has HP-IB and that I control with my 41/71/75 using the 82169A.
edit: typo

[KeithB]

And GPIB can still do things that LAN and USB can't. Such as a simultaneous trigger.

[floppy]

As Interface between an HP71 and a disk drive "7958a" ?
http://www.hpmuseum.net/display_item.php?hw=251

[Sylvain Cote]

(10-18-2022 06:37 PM)floppy Wrote:  As Interface between an HP71 and a disk drive "7958a" ?
http://www.hpmuseum.net/display_item.php?hw=251

Not possible directly.
The 7958 disk drive only support the CS/80 command set.
The 41/71/75 only support the Filbert command set.

References:

• Disk and Tape Interface Protocols for Some HP Corvallis Devices
• 9895A Service Manual (describe the Amigo command set)
• CS/80 → Command Set for the 80's
• SS/80 → Sub-command Set 80
• Filbert command set
• The HPDrive Project
• 82161A Digital Cassette Drive Owner's Manual (support Filbert command set)
• 9114A/B Floppy Disk Drive (support Filbert and SS/80 command sets)
• 7958A Hardware Support Manual (support CS/80 command set)
• HP Vintage Documentation
  

edit 1: added the reference section
edit 2: I have to check, but I would guess that CS/80 units should also support SS/80 since this protocol is a subset of the CS/80 protocol.
edit 3: added the amigo command set reference

[Garth Wilson]

HP-IB, or GPIB, or IEEE-488 (all the same thing) was used for interfacing lab instrumentation for measurement, data acquisition, automation, etc.. Think:

• signal generators
• programmable power supplies
• relay boxes
• DMMs
• frequency counters
• fiberoptic test equipment
• RF power meters
• network analyzers
• spectrum analyzers
• oscilloscopes
• pulse generators
• telecommunications test equipment
• ...and lots more.

I have not kept up with what's being done in this field in 2022, as my work has gradually evolved in a little different direction regarding test & measurement and control; but I have in front of me the 1986 HP catalog that's 1.5" (4cm) thick, full of such instrumentation, and on the shelf, more from other manufacturers including Wavetek, Keithley, Gould, Krohn-Hite, Kikusui, and more. This goes far, far beyond office and home equipment like mass storage and printers. The HP82169A could be used by even the HP-41 to interface to nearly every piece of IEEE-488 equipment, and dozens at a time, of the hundreds and probably thousands of models out there. Most people on this forum are totally unaware of the vast extent. This equipment was well built, and much of it that's even many decades old is still in service.

[floppy]

(10-18-2022 07:09 PM)Sylvain Cote Wrote:  Not possible directly.
The 7958 disk drive only support the CS/80 command set.
The 41/71/75 only support the Filbert command set.

https://groups.io/g/hpseries80/wiki/4802
It means, programs should be developed to achieve this?
So far I understand from the link, something similar to "FATLEX in the HP 71B Data Acquisition Pack".
Perhaps few ROMs, accessing "7958a", exists already?

[Martin Hepperle]

Specific software COULD be written - whether it SHOULD be written is a philosophical question.

In principle, only the HP 110 and the Serie-80 with EMS ROM can directly use the SS/80 drives like the 7958.
You could use any other calculator/computer to read and write sectors of a 7958 and similar drive.
This requires a program which does a few things:

• read the directory,
• find out the starting sector and the file length,
• read the appropriate sectors and store the result somewhere in the computer.
  

Similarly for writing, where one would also have to include locating free space in the directory and on the disk, updating the directory entry and writing the actual data.
Initializing a disc would come next.

Each operation requires to follow the SS/80 protocol, which is a 3-phase transaction scheme (Command, Execute, Status). This is a bit more complex than the simpler Filbert way.

All this could be done with a medium sized, special program. Such a program could be used for specific applications. The 9114 is a good candidate for experimentation, because it understands both protocols.

For a real integration into the system, you would have to hook into the system via a LEX file or BPGM, find out whether the target device is a SS/80 device, if not, use the previous system routines, otherwise use your new routines.
Thus, the hook would duplicate all mass storage keywords or you would have to hook one layer below the keyword level into the system, if this is possible.

The effort is not small and I am not sure whether you can really make good use of a 170 MB hard disk on a HP-71 or HP-75. Usually a capacity of 1-5 MB would be enough for these small systems.

I find that going through the HP-IL <-> HP-IB converter slows disc access down by a large amount. I tried this with an HP Portable Plus. It works, but is rather slow. Much slower than using the link via HP-IL to a 9114 or a PIL-Box.

I have attached the file from HP-75 with HP-9114 using SS/80 in case you cannot access the groups.io file.

Martin

[Hans Brueggemann]

(10-15-2022 10:16 PM)Sylvain Cote Wrote:  ... I have multimeters, power supply, data acquisition units, etc that has HP-IB and that I control with my 41/71/75 using the 82169A.

same here, but a more "hybrid" approach, where all instrumentation equipment is connected through HP-IB to an HP82169A, which in turn is connected to other HPIL stuff and then controlled by an HP-71B, or HP-41CX. hard to beat combo when it comes to long-term data acquisition with low power consumption.

[Garth Wilson]

https://www.electronics-notes.com/articl...eee488.php, which I just came across while looking for something else, says,

Quote:The GPIB has been available since the late 1960s, but despite its age, it is still a valuable tool that is widely used throughout the industry. Most bench instruments have GPIB fitted as standard or as an option making it easy to use test equipment in a variety of applications apart from being dedicated to use in an ATE [automated test equipment] test stack. Additionally GPIB or IEEE 488 is used in a wide number of other applications including data acquisition.

Although computers tend not to have GPIB interfaces fitted as standard today, a GPIB card may be bought and installed. In view of its flexibility and convenience and it is likely to remain in widespread use for some years to come.

[KeithB]

That article is a bit out of date. Most Keysight equipment comes with only USB and Ethernet connections. GPIB, optional.

When was the last time you bought a "card" for your computer? Most of the interfaces are now USB->GPIB, and they work well.

[rprosperi]

(11-01-2022 12:41 PM)KeithB Wrote:  When was the last time you bought a "card" for your computer?

Last Friday... (but yeah, no longer common; in fact the most common is to add a USB board for more 3.0 ports )

Quote:Most of the interfaces are now USB->GPIB, and they work well.

Can you recommend a particular one you've used, known to work well with HP gear?

[KeithB]

I like the NI GPIB-USB-HS+
https://www.ni.com/en-us/support/model.g...b-hs-.html

The software is bloatware, like all NI software, but they work well and are easy to program.
NI provides class libraries so you can use them with .Net.

[KeithB]

I guess I should mention that Keysight makes their own interface:
https://www.keysight.com/us/en/product/8...b-2-0.html

However, Keysight's libraries are just as much bloat ware as NI's. (It examines every single USB stick I put in looking for libraries!)

Also, many instruments have "VI" drivers that theoretically make it easier to use them. I don't like so many software dependencies, so I don't bother. Though with the lower quality documentation, it takes some trial and error with complicated instruments like Arb's.

[rprosperi]

Thanks very much for both the links and comments.

At $730 - $1,000, I now understand why I wasn't familiar with them.

I would have guessed, especially these prices, that these would have USB 3.0 interface support, but they're both USB 2.0. OTOH, I suppose even USB2 is more than fast enough for HP-IB traffic?

[Garth Wilson]

(11-02-2022 12:23 AM)rprosperi Wrote:  I suppose even USB2 is more than fast enough for HP-IB traffic?

The original HP-IB speed was approximately equal to the original USB speed. The later HS-488 was about eight times as fast, but USB 2.0 was that fast times about six; so yes, USB 2.x would be more than fast enough for HP-IB traffic.

When I attended a seminar on HP-IB controllers, HP was using the 68000, and someone asked why not a faster processor, like a 68030. The answer given was that there wasn't much point in going faster because so much time was taken waiting for readings to come back from the equipment. This is my experience too.

[KeithB]

(11-02-2022 12:23 AM)rprosperi Wrote:  Thanks very much for both the links and comments.

I would have guessed, especially these prices, that these would have USB 3.0 interface support, but they're both USB 2.0. OTOH, I suppose even USB2 is more than fast enough for HP-IB traffic?

There is not much market anymore for them. Most of the systems at Sandia where I work are ethernet based. I am about the only dinosaur I know using GPIB. You *can* get an ethernet to GPIB adapter. I have used it in two situations:
One: I had a GPIB based system at the end of a *long* cable run into an cyclotron.
The other is when I was troubleshooting a GPIB system from home. The internet delay was *almost* too much.

[Christoph Giesselink]

HP-IB or IEEE 488 is not fully obsolete now.

IMHO in professional test systems measurement instruments with Legacy RS232C or USB interface are not professional, these are hobby interfaces for very small measurement systems.

Remaining today we have instruments with IEEE 488 or a LAN interface using TCP/IP. But still some reference measurement have only an IEEE 488 interface. Mostly all instruments published in the last 15 years have a Ethernet interface now.

What I'm talking about?

In the 90'ies a typical measurement system I used consists of

• Power Supply
• Multimeter
• DC Calibrator
• Resistor Decade
• Resistor Decade
• Frequency generator
  

all with a IEEE 488 interface.

On other systems we also used additional pressure references for different ranges all with a IEEE 488 interface too. So a measurement system with 5 or more instruments was normal. On larger systems, especially with long distances between instruments, we had problems with signal reflections because the IEEE 488 interface don't use a signal terminator. Of course in this systems we tried to avoid a star topology to reduce the open endpoints.

In the beginning we used IEEE 488 ISA cards from Ines with DOS-drivers. Around 2000 with Win NT4.0 as OS, older cards had to be modified by the manufacturer and the new software consists of a Windows specific driver and HP-VISA drivers.

Early/Mid of the '00 years PC boards with an ISA slot get rare and so we bought Ines interface cards with a PCI interface still using the combination of Windows specific driver and HP-VISA drivers.

But HP-VISA as interface was not the best choice. Many software using the VISA interface were develop for the interface of the market leader NI! So we had to rewrite every software, especially software written by the manufacturer showing the capabilities of the instrument.

End of the '00 years also PC's with PCI bus get rare, so we decided not to use PC cards any more. We don't wanted to buy new IEEE 488 cards for every new PC generation with a new bus interface. So further we used an external LAN to IEEE 488 converter from NI with NI-VISA.

Sorry, I don't miss the HP-VISA drivers any more. With Windows 10 an update to the latest version of NI-VISA was necessary, so for the first time since using NI-VISA we had to recompile our sources. The software build with prior versions of the VISA-DLL interface crashed.

From the driver aspect, the NI-VISA drivers are a better choice, especially when you want to control instruments with LAN Interface over VISA. The VISA standard for TCP/IP instruments had some dialects and in many cases I was not able to connect instruments over TCP/IP with the HP-VISA driver.

But meanwhile I'm glad that I have also calibration systems without any IEEE 488 connected instrument, all using Ethernet connections over TCP/IP mainly raw sockets, others over TCP/IP in NI-VISA.

Will I ever connect an IEEE 488 instrument to a HP-IL controller like the HP-71B to control something. No, I don't.

HP82169A useful in anno 2022?

So not for me, the HP82169A is only interesting for me as collectors item without the IEEE 488 cable and an IEEE 488 capable instrument.

[KeithB]

(11-02-2022 01:00 AM)Garth Wilson Wrote:  When I attended a seminar on HP-IB controllers, HP was using the 68000, and someone asked why not a faster processor, like a 68030. The answer given was that there wasn't much point in going faster because so much time was taken waiting for readings to come back from the equipment. This is my experience too.

Indeed, when people ask what kind of specs I need for an instrument control computer, I just say: whatever they have on the shelf, anything that is current.