Wednesday, March 25, 2015

Fixed up lighting in data center shed


I went to the Computer History Museum to meet with the rest of the 1401 Restoration team, work on some tape drive problems on the German 1401 system and spent a bit of time with the Ramac restoration team as they set up for their weekly demonstraton. They gave me some ideas about how I might find replacement disk heads to replace the two crashed heads of my CHI drive. That drive is a second unit, whereas the builtin IBM drive in the 1131 is working just fine.

SAC INTERFACE FOR ADDING PERIPHERALS TO THE 1130

A few transistors on board 1 for the driver circuit were not reliably soldered. I am scoping the signals and setting up various tests to determine the state of the driven signals and the 1131 response.

DATACENTER SHED CONSTRUCTION

I installed a pair of wooden rails to span the two center roof trusses, placed the reflector umbrella in the center and then attached the light and its electrical support boxes. It provided a nice flood lighting with the bright portion roughly fix feet in diameter, which should be good enough for general task lighting inside the shed given the 7000 lumen total output. The umbrella rod stuck down below the level of the roof trusses but was quickly trimmed to size.

The data center needs some ventilation and humidity control attention next, but that can wait a while since it will be a minimum of a month and likely more before the 1130 system could be moved into the data center space. 

No comments:

Post a Comment