Miscellaneous work mostly for the Documation card reader tasks

 PREPARING NEW CABLE TO SPLICE ON THE MAGNETIC PICKUP

I chose a microphone cable with XLR connectors as the source for my replacement cable. It has two leads and a ground shield and is a suitable impedance. I began to strip and organize the wires to join together and insulate. One end needs Amphenol connector pins to insert into the female connector in the card cage. 

I removed the three connectors from the old cable and carefully soldered the new cable wires onto the pins. Unfortunately, the pin with the shield attached broke off as I was attempting to insert it into the connector. I will have to find another pin and try again later. 

CONSTRUCTING THE ALUMINUM ENCLOSURE FOR THE EXTERNAL INTERFACE

The project box also arrived and I began moving the external interface for the M600 reader into it. I punched holes to allow the cables to enter from the connector that screws into the back of the card reader. 

Next I have to mount the pushbutton and LED for the End of File state, set up the USB socket and a power connector, then mount the PCB inside securely. 

BUILDING MORE READER INTERFACES SINCE I HAVE PCBS AND COMPONENTS

I began to use the PCB blanks and my stock of the microcontroller, IO interface chip and other components to assemble more interfaces. I don't have a specific need for them right now but they may be useful to someone else with a Documation card reader and it is an easy task to complete. 

SORTING AND ORGANIZING THE WORKSHOP

Every day I try to spend between half an hour and a full hour sorting and organizing the items in the workshop. I began with integrated circuits and then resistors. I have quite a few cabinets with small drawers that already housed quite a few ICs and resistors.

My Tauntek IC Tester is useful to verify the working status of many of the chips. Unfortunately, only a subset of the chips have existing drawers in the cabinets and only a subset are supported by the tester. Worse, the subsets are not identical. Still, I have able to build a pile of tested and working chips that can be put in new storage bins as I build them. The larger pile still exists of chips that are not in the tester nor in my drawers - more modern devices, memory, and so forth - that I will need to organize somehow.

Resistors were more straightforward to handle. Many of the values exist in the cabinet drawers and I could add to them readily. Some odd values are in a miscellaneous resistor case, thus everything is handled. I expect to do similar things with all my capacitors, but I don't have any existing cabinets or storage. Same for diodes, transistors and other component categories. 

BUILDING THE CARD EXTENDER FOR THE DOCUMATION READERS

The two PCBs from Poul-Henning at the Datamuseum arrived yesterday and today I began to prepare them for use. One of them will have female connectors added so that Documation PCBs can be plugged into the extender and the combination plugged into the reader card cage. The other will have pins set up for the logic analyzer so that it can be plugged into card slot 4, unpopulated on my two readers, to give easy access to the motherboard signals. 

My female connectors are designed to install into a chassis and have wirewrap tails for the signals. This does not directly interface with the extender cards, but I can use L brackets to bolt the connectors to the end of the extender and then use wires to connect the signals to the wirewrap tails. I drilled the holes for the L brackets but am waiting for that hardware to continue.