And this is a good time to encourage people to upload the firmware they have in their instruments if its not already available, or if you have a newer version than whats available.
Not fun to have a perfectly good old test equipment disable due to a rotten eprom.
I recently uploaded the firmware from, my?HP 54645A scope, as I could not find it anywhere. My fw version is A.01.01, and latest listed at keysight is 2.0 and asking here gave no reply.
I think I still have a couple of firmware's I need to read out and upload, as I have not seen them online, will do next time the instruments is opened up.
On Mon, Feb 11, 2019 at 2:14 AM walter shawlee <walter2@...> wrote:
This may come in handy for others, I had an 8753A I got off ebay fo rmy RF bench.? It worked for one day, then went into random display and status mode, totally unusable. Most times, I got no display, but sometimes random lines and random LEDs on, no key press response. Rats...
All the power supplies looked good, no visible heat or corrosion damage, and re-seating the cards did nothing.? I got a new set of 6 eproms from Bruce Lane at Blue Feather Technology, and ta-da, the unit came back to life perfectly.? The old parts had all the labels missing, but were original, and had the 1986 code copyright. The age of those parts (checked against other part date codes) is approximately 30+ years, right on track for code failure based on the part datasheets. the threshold seems to be around 25 years for UV eproms to experience code rot.
Many older HP units have deteriorating eprom code from this same era, so it's worth exploring this as a fix, and many on-line code repositories are now up to support this. If you see completely un-explainable random operation, this is a good place to look.
all the best, walter (walter2 -at- ) sphere research corp.
