Tuesday, May 24, 2016

1442 back together, testing now, plus rebuilding laptop

1442 CARD READER/PUNCH RESTORATION

I have installed one of the linkages and was working on the second one by lunchtime. I also located the place for most of the remaining parts in the bin, which are part of the punch eject roller and its belt drive. However, there are just a few mystery parts which worry me, particularly two of them. A circlip which suggests a roller somewhere that is not properly secured on its post, and a U shaped pin which might be from deep inside the punch unit.

Hand operating the punch unit, I see it drive all 12 punches through their dies and advance everything suitably, but until I have this under power I won't know if the interposers work to block punching each of the 12 rows.

It was quite challenging to handle each of the remaining tasks, given their nearly inaccessible locations, lack of enough room to use any of my tools and the challenge of stretching the rubber drive belts over the edges of the pulleys. I improvised with a tiny socket held with itty bitty vice-grips, and similar improvisations.

By mid afternoon, I had the linkage on, the punch eject roller parts assembled, belts in place and everything ready to button up for testing. I had dropped the circlip down into the machinery somewhere while trying to fit it somewhere it didn't belong. I also lost a lockwasher for the bolt that holds the punch eject pulley on.

Remaining mystery parts are a small nut, a medium size washer and the small U shaped thing. I hope I never discover where those parts go, since that would be discovered when some part of the machine malfunctioned.

I fired up the system, loaded cards (push Start button to get one card to feed into the pre-read station), and did Non-Process Runout (NPRO) to clear cards. Cards that exit the punch station still get stuck in the cornering station, where cards stop after exiting the punch and them are picked up by the stackers which begins moving the card at right angles to the original travel direction.

More seriously, while doing an NPRO, the punch unit laced the card in rows 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8 although this was a real punch operation. When punching, the card sits in the punch station and is moved column by column through the operation of the incremental drive, timed between each punch cycle. In this case, while the punches were pushing down the card was trying to fly through the punch station, using the punch eject roller and not the incremental drive.

This might be an interaction between my virtual 1442 logic sitting in the fpga and the IBM supplied adapter logic in the 1130. I removed the jumper that disables the IBM adapter from reacting to XIO instructions, which was in place while I tested the virtual 1442 functions. Now, both FPGA and 1130 logic are active which might introduce problems. Still, punching randomly while cards are cleared with an NPRO is not good.

RECOVERY OF CRASHED LAPTOP

My first two actions on the new laptop image were applying all the windows updates and setting up a Crashplan subscription to make sure I never again lose all my work. I am waiting to see if the recovery lab can retrieve my data, but my drive arrived in the afternoon Friday of a three day weekend (Victoria day in Canada) so that my drive was just opened and logged today.  I am hopeful but not wildly optimistic; I should know in a week or two.

Next up I started installing software I use, such as the Python environment and the wxPython GUI code. The longest was the download and install of the Xilinx Vivado toolchain for the fpgas, requiring downloads of more than 3GB of data.

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