I investigated the three bad SCR positions I had previously uncovered and discovered that in two of the cases, the issue was that the large flat contact surface (anode) didn't flow onto the PCB pad beneath, leaving the circuit open. Resoldering brought them into full operation.
Working through my big PCB, I began to check the continuity to the anode. Fortunately, the SCR type has a stub lead sticking out of the side between the cathode and gate, which I can reach with ohmmeter probes and check to see if the anode is connected to the lamp pin. I repaired several positions that had such faults and each worked perfectly after the fix.
I definitely had to repair the original SCR that is wrong, the one I tested with in my first attempt, since it won't fire until the voltage gets to an unacceptably high level on the input pin. I used my hot air rework gun to strip off the failed part and solder in a replacement. Voila, the board is now fully functional.
I am now bottlenecked waiting for the light bulbs to arrive from China. The boards are complete but I don't have enough bulbs to load onto the boards and install them into the 1130. When I solder each lamp on the header pins, I plan to encapsulate it in silicone which will prevent the wires from ever shorting together, as that would destroy an SCR.
I installed quite a few bulbs onto one of the boards and did a test fit to see how easily the could be fit into space without bending or damaging the lamps. The results were excellent, which implies that once I have all the bulbs on their headers and potted with silicone, placing the boards against the honeycomb will be easy.
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| Bulbs on headers plugged into sockets on PCB, after test fitting into honeycomb |
ALTO DISK TOOL
I worked on the testbed to check out my write cartridge code, since something is going wrong when I attempted to write an entire cartridge on the real disk drive. The logic stopped after the first sector was written and a flag bit indicated an overrun, where the writing FSM is still active when the next sector mark arrives.
I can't see any place that will write the overrun flag, so that must have been a false indication during my testing, something I misread. I concentrated on the logic that steps my transaction through writing the entire cartridge.
I don't see anything that should block the write from continuing sector by sector, so I set up for some testing, simulating the sector mark and disk status to allow my logic to run. I set up the scope to track key signals, the first of which is the WriteGate signal which defines the range of the write to an individual sector. If that is active long enough to run into the next sector mark (3.3 ms) then I may be experiencing overrun conditions.
I see the sector begin writing at the sector mark and the last word of zeroes is written at 3.168ms. The sector has over 160 us of free time before we reach the next sector mark. This reinforces my belief that we are not experiencing overruns when writing a sector.
I wondered whether I might start the next sector (sector 1) while in the midst of a sector mark interval (i.e. it was already logically 1 when I started looking for a sector match), but with the SM only 5 us long, it can't force us into an overrun situation.
I kept looking, focusing on what has to happen for the WriteEntireCartridge state machine to step through the entire cartridge sector by sector. I changed the diagnostic outputs to give me the data that will help pinpoint the cause of any problem.
IBM 1401 RESTORATION WORK
We have a document of uncertain quality that was built by field engineering specialists back in the 7094 and 1401 era, listing a number of general market transistor types that are said to match an IBM transistor number. We were missing spare 028 and 036 transistors, but the chart gave us 'equivalents' as 2N1038 and 2N456. Those in turn are in equivalence tables to the NTE numbering scheme as NTE176 and NTE104.
Using the NTE numbers, we bought a few of each type to use in repairing the voltage regulator card for the extended memory frame of the Connecticut 1401 system. This card is a differential amplifier that compares the voltage being produced by the power supply to a reference value set on a small potentiometer. The difference signal is amplified by a chain of two transistors (028 and 036) and that drives the base current of the parallel 108 transistors that deliver up to 7A of the regulated voltage.
Normally we can test transistors for signs of death using a DMM, either looking at resistance across the various junctions or using the diode tester function. There should be a one-way path from emitter to base, and a one-way path from base to collector, of the appropriate polarity, but no path from emitter to collector.
That is true for silicon transistors, but germanium ones exhibit enough leakage current that they will slightly bias themselves on, passing current in one direction from emitter to collector even with no current supplied to the base. Further, if a transistor becomes weak, having too low an amplification factor, it will still test good on the DMM but fail to deliver enough current in the real circuit.
We suspect that is what has happened in the voltage regulator card (and a second known failed card which keeps the voltage lower than the first card, but still is not able to drive it down to the set target voltage. Our bad card will allow the voltage to exceed 40 volts, while this second card keeps it down to 33V. The target is 30V, which neither can maintain. Weak amplification would explain this.
I have a Peak Atlas DCA Pro DCA75 tester that will measure amplification, leakage and other factors. I will use that when checking out any suspect transistors.
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