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Re: HP 53310A - Why did I not know about this sooner?


 

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Personally I'd use the XMOS xCORE devices, with code written in xC.
?- rock solid *hard* realtime guarantees: the IDE specifies the *exact*
?? number of clock cycles the code will take. None of this "measure and
?? hope we've found the worst case" rubbish :)
?- FPGA-like I/O structures: 250mb/s per pin, SERDES, strobed, , etc 1-32
?? bit, I/O happens on specified clock cycle
?- up to 32 cores, 4000MIPS MCUs
?- *fun*, in a way that conventional MCUs aren't
?- easy: I had my first program executing correctly within half a day of
?? downloading the IDE
?- no errata that I've seen
?- mercifully brief and explicit documentation (because the abstractions
?? are good and well implemented)
?- buy them at Digikey
?- been available for 13 years, actively being developed and enhanced?

And most notably, the hardware, language and software tools were designed together as a whole. There are dozens of multicore designs, but the software is an afterthought - with little thought given to the hard real time and parallel processing requirements.

The XMOS team uses parallel processing concepts that have around for decades: Hoare's Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP), the Transputer, and xC is an updated Occam with additions for hard realtime I/O.

An example of what one medium-sized MCU can do in software:
?- input two 62.5Mb/s data streams and count the 0->1 transitions,
?- front panel i/o and control
?- communicate control and results over USB to a PC
guaranteed not to miss any edges.

Other example is generating/consuming 100Mb/s serial ethernet packets in software (but personally I think it better to use an internal ethernet peripheral)

A four page overview is at

Overview of the language and how to use it:
That's longer, but is beautifully written and pleasingly concise.




On 20/04/20 03:10, Kuba Ober wrote:

I imagine that pretty much all legacy HP displays can be emulated using a single chip and a few screenfulls of code, outputting straight to VGA or HDMI :) Parallax Propeller 2 is the magic sauce that makes it possible. It¡¯s quite an amazing design, done in the open (yeah, open source silicon with full commercial backing) and it¡¯s actually fun to program it. It was meant to ¡°mess with¡± - it¡¯s not like the usual ARM chips with a boatload of erratas and data sheets thousand pages long. You can do very meaningful things without leaving assembler, if you like that sort of a thing. Want to sample XY signals at 100Ms/s? You can. On each pair of I/O pins. Simultaneously :)

They are currently offering 2nd silicon revision engineering samples, and you can actually talk to the designer of the chip on the forums. Those samples work very well, and the ¡°errata¡± fits in a paragraph last I checked. I imagine that the production silicon won¡¯t have an errata. There¡¯s a whole bunch of people that used that design before it was available in silicon, so lots of kinks got straightened out long ago.

Also, it comes with a FORTH interpreter in ROM, with runtime library that actually supports the peripherals. What¡¯s not to love :)

Cheers, Kuba Ober

16 apr. 2020 kl. 2:04 em skrev Tam Hanna <tamhan@...>:

? Stay OFF the Danaher 57x series. My replacement for these is almost ready.

As for the 53310A: not sure if it pays. You would need to use an FPGA to harvest the digital data being farted out. I wanted to do it once, but never had the time. However, afaik, the video board on these units is a separate board (as per the late Jzon Geller), and some instructions in the service manual of the 53310A even give some data about the pinout.

Tam
With best regards
Tam HANNA (emailing on a BlackBerry PRIV)

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Am 16. April 2020 19:56:40 MESZ schrieb Bill E <solartron@...>:
That's something I've been thinking about for a while now. I have several instruments where I'd like to replace the CRT. I know there have been a few people in the past that have done some for specific instruments, but I don't know of a general solution. One would think that for many instruments, should be fairly easy. They usually used OEM CRT displays that had simple analog or pseudo-digital intensity signals, and standard or close-to-standard scan rates. But, for the older style oscopes where it was a classic deflection CRT with the text additions being done by vector graphics, whole different game.My 54540 really needs a new CRT, modern replacement would rock. I'll add it to my list. :)
_._

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