WIRING AND INSTALLING PARTS OF IBM 1130 CONSOLE PRINTER EMULATOR

ASSEMBLING IBM 1130 CONSOLE PRINTER (1053) EMULATOR BOX

I rough mounted my controls and digital display in the box while I work on the wiring of the SMS paddle card cables and other parts. I still need to mount the 7 segment BCD driver board underneath the display board, mount the adapter boards from the SMS cables, and the Arduino itself, before I can close up the box and have it ready for live testing on an IBM 1130 in a few weeks.

Face of the box containing the 1053 emulator, rough placement of buttons

The box has three buttons across the bottom in a row. From left to right, those are Tab, Space and Return functions. Above them is the digital display of the current column for the virtual carrier. To the left of the digital display are the tab setting buttons. The top of the two sets a tab stop at the current column while the bottom of the two will clear any stop at this column.

Junction boards to connect SMS cables into device

I used small breadboard PCBs to connect the SMS paddle card cables as a strain relief and means to ease the connection to my Arduino. Most of the signals are incoming and will go directly to the Arduino, but four of them are feedback signals that will come from a relay board which switches the 12V and 48V needed by the 1130 controller logic.

The inside of this box is going to be crowded, even though it is relatively large at 11 3/8 x 8 1/4 x 3", because of the five boards plus Arduino and all the wires between the parts. The key to construction will be mounting all the boards on standoffs inside.

By the end of the evening today, I had the first PCB fully wired to the header pins to take the 12 signals on SMS Paddle card 1 and route them into the Arduino. Tomorrow I will work on the PCB for SMS Paddle card 2, then start wiring the relay board into place.