I purchased a fully loaded 16900A for quite a bargain recently. It has (1) 16950B, 16M, 667MHZ state mode, and 4ghz timing zoom module. It also has (5) 16910A's, 16M option, 500MHZ state mode option. The 16950B is 68-channels, and the 16910A's are 102-channels. I wasn't a math major, but that's almost 600-channels of simultaneous capture.

A couple friends asked, what are you going to do with all those channels? While truthfully I don't know, I can certainly do whatever the heck I'd want to do with this beast!

Several notes of my getting this thing back online:

* I am amazed, that for a 12-year old unit (my best guess as to the age), at how clean this thing was inside and out. Very, very little dust. I wonder if it spent most of it's life in a clean room.

* I believe this was used at the famous CPU manufacturer to develop and test then current CPU.

* The excellence of the design is obvious throughout the entire product. The CPU tray is simply a module, which is mounted on rails, which allows for removal/replacement/changes without removing any modules. The backplane connectors have guide-posts to ensure proper alignment. All cables are zip-tied, sometimes sleeved, and the thing is solid as a brick dunny. I can't get over how nicely everything fits together.

* I replaced the spinning HDD with a modern SSD. I'm sure the CPU/chipset/mobo can't handle or take advantage of the speed, but a newer replacement was necessary for continued reliability. The 80GB Hitachi Deskstar(!!) passed LONG SMART tests, and continues to function fine.

* The Adlink 815G industrial motherboard(Note earlier versions used a different mobo) that the system is based on doesn't support SATA natively. I added a QNINE(some off-brand Chinese) Sil3114-based 4-port card from Amazon. The card specifically supports Windows XP, and I believed the drivers to be already installed. They definitely were not!

* Getting XP to boot off the SSD was a nightmare. Windows kept blue screening a STOP 0x0000007B error, which means Inaccessible Boot Device. The Award BIOS 6.00PG present had no real relevant options to help, and does not see the HDD present, even after getting it work.

* The keysight-provided recovery DVD includes scripts that use Norton Ghost to restore the hard drive to factory condition. The problem is that because it's not a normal full-XP install, you can't inject alternative SATA drivers at any point, and you'll end up with the dreaded 0x7B again. It's interesting that the restore DVD and ghost can see and reimage the SSD via SATA without help, but the XP install can't.

* There are a couple ways to fix this 0x7B problem. First, you can do what's called "slipstreaming" where you create an XP install disk using a regular XP disks, combine your SATA drivers, and then boot off the newly created disk. See the free tool nlite (not the similar sounding newer pay tool). The issue with this is that you end up with a non-standard Agilent install. This will still work, however.

* What I did was this: use Keysight recovery DVD to image the SSD with the official XP SP2 image. Then, using a normal Windows XP SP2 OS installation CD, I performed a repair (not using the recovery console) and simply chose the existing install, and reinstalled Windows XP SP2. This preserved the existing installed programs, screensavers, boot options, drivers, and so on. Prior to this step, I put my SATA drivers on floppy disk, and attached via USB Floppy drive, and chose F6 to load them during the re-setup. Important note: when you see the "Insert manufacturer supplied driver disk" message, and press S, and then enter, simply nothing appears to happen! You must continue through the process by processing ENTER to continue, and then you'll see your floppy go active, and a setup text indicating your drivers are being used! It's very intuitive)

* Another note: not all USB-attached floppies drivers are recognized by the XP installer. You need to either use one of the ones listed in the TXTSETUP.SIF file (search for USBSTOR) or manually add an entry for your drive.

* After getting the machine to boot, I updated to Service Pack 3 using the Microsoft downloadable EXE, and then installed the Keysight Logic Analyzer 5.90 application. That installer needs to install .NET 3.51 and .NET 4.00 and this takes A LOOOOOOONG time. It also installs the Windows XP drivers(both of them, there's two) to support the PCI card which talks to the modules.

* The USB ports are version 1.1 by the best I can tell. Using flash drives are painfully the slow. My chassis had the gigabit ethernet card which is MUCH MUCH faster for doing samba transfers. Note that some modern samba installations (I'm looking at you Ubuntu) turn of NTLM and lanman hashes, which means that you need to re-enable support to be able to connect --- otherwise your passwords fail when trying to connect!

* I am surprised at just how much this thing is just a regular of-era Windows XP PC. All the normal PC-like things apply, and I'm convinced that you could use a more modern PC, more modern (but still 32-bit!!!) operating system, and really get this thing humming. I'm not sure there's an obvious benefit, because this LA is plenty usable in its current form. But for fun, who knows? I think there's threads on eevblog about this!

I'll be writing a future blog post on my blog about this with full pictures and links.

I just thought I'd share.

Thanks!
Keith

On Sun, Mar 24, 2019 at 11:45 AM Keith Monahan via Groups.Io
<keith@...> wrote:

* The Adlink 815G industrial motherboard(Note earlier versions used a
different mobo) that the system is based on doesn't support SATA
natively. I added a QNINE(some off-brand Chinese) Sil3114-based 4-port
card from Amazon. The card specifically supports Windows XP, and I
believed the drivers to be already installed. They definitely were not!

* Getting XP to boot off the SSD was a nightmare. Windows kept blue
screening a STOP 0x0000007B error, which means Inaccessible Boot Device.
The Award BIOS 6.00PG present had no real relevant options to help, and
does not see the HDD present, even after getting it work.

I don't remember having any problems when I tried using a Buslink
SPCI2P PCI-SATA card, which uses the Sil3112A. It might be that the
drivers are only preinstalled for that particular PCI device, and not
any other versions of Silicon Image PCI-SATA bridge chips. I'd have to
get set up to try the recovery installation process again to verify
that.

* After getting the machine to boot, I updated to Service Pack 3 using
the Microsoft downloadable EXE, and then installed the Keysight Logic
Analyzer 5.90 application. That installer needs to install .NET 3.51 and
.NET 4.00 and this takes A LOOOOOOONG time. It also installs the Windows
XP drivers(both of them, there's two) to support the PCI card which
talks to the modules.

Yes, you want to update to XP SP3, then install the .NET packages so
you can install the version 05.90.1104 analyzer application software.
The .NET package installation is one of the longest parts of the whole
system setup from scratch. A set up from scratch on a bare hard drive
can take a few hours to get everything installed.

* The USB ports are version 1.1 by the best I can tell. Using flash
drives are painfully the slow. My chassis had the gigabit ethernet card
which is MUCH MUCH faster for doing samba transfers. Note that some
modern samba installations (I'm looking at you Ubuntu) turn of NTLM and
lanman hashes, which means that you need to re-enable support to be able
to connect --- otherwise your passwords fail when trying to connect!

I picked up a few new bulk package Adaptec AUA-5100B PCI USB 2.0 cards
cheap on eBay. Those use the NEC uPD720101 (now Renesas), which is one
of the better USB 2.0 controllers from what I remember from my USB
development days. No problem getting that to work in the 16900A with
the preinstalled drivers. The Adaptec AUA-2000C appears to use the
same uPD720101 and those are also cheap in new bulk package condition
on eBay.

I believe GBit Ethernet card is just a standard Intel PRO/1000 XT
PCI-X card, plugged into a 32-bit slot, with a low profile bracket.

* I am surprised at just how much this thing is just a regular of-era
Windows XP PC. All the normal PC-like things apply, and I'm convinced
that you could use a more modern PC, more modern (but still 32-bit!!!)
operating system, and really get this thing humming. I'm not sure
there's an obvious benefit, because this LA is plenty usable in its
current form. But for fun, who knows? I think there's threads on eevblog
about this!

I wasn't really into trying to hot rod my 16900A. A motherboard swap
would be a mechanical challenge due to the motherboard I/O cutouts
being integrated into the motherboard tray instead of using a
replaceable pop-in/out I/O shield you could change to match a
different motherboard. As I already mentioned previously you can use
the 16900A mainframe CPU as just a server for the acquisition modules
and run the analyzer application remotely on a much faster system over
the GBit Ethernet.

One thing I did do is install an add-in AGP graphics adapter. Nothing
fancy, just wanted DVI output. I think it was an older passively
cooled VisionTek Radeon 7K. That's somewhat period appropriate for a
Windows XP system. There might have already been drivers preinstalled
so I didn't have to install any vendor driver crapware.

One limitation with the 16900A is only 3 PCI slots (1 shared with the
AGP slot). So you can have only 3 of a GBit Ethernet card, a USB 2.0
card, a PCI-SATA card, and a PCI/AGP graphics card, if you are into
trying to max out the system.

On Sun, Mar 24, 2019 at 11:45 AM Keith Monahan via Groups.Io
<keith@...> wrote:

* The keysight-provided recovery DVD includes scripts that use Norton
Ghost to restore the hard drive to factory condition.

I finally found my recovery DVDs. The DVDs that I received as physical
copies from Agilent in the "Part Number: 16900-68722 16900A/16902A
Recovery DVD Kit" envelope are labeled "Logic Analyzer Recovery DVD
16900A and 16902A Only" / "Part Number: 16900-14121" on the DVD
itself.

I forgot that there is a different recovery DVD for the 16903A, part
number 16903-14107. I had to request an image for that one from
Keysight before it magically appeared (and quickly disappeared later)
on their FTP server.

Ah, now I remember even more. There used to be a handy text file on
their FTP server named "Decoder Ring (Which one do you need).txt"
which had the part numbers for the appropriate recovery media. On the
recovery media there is an XML file which has some hard coded values
to check in the BIOS for a match before the image restore will
proceed. While the same ADLINK M-815G motherboard is used in multiple
analyzers, it may have different analyzer dependent signatures in the
BIOS.

16900-14121 DVD \Recovery\ag169xx.xml

<!-- Recovery Set for Agilent 16900A/16902A -->

<FrameDescription>
<Device VendorID="0x8086" DeviceID="0x244B"/>
<FrameString Segment="F000" Offset="0892" Value="16900"/>
</FrameDescription>

16903-14107 DVD \Recovery\ag169xx.xml

<!-- Recovery Set for Agilent 16903A -->

<FrameDescription>
<Device VendorID="0x8086" DeviceID="0x244B"/>
<FrameString Segment="F000" Offset="0892" Value="16903"/>
<FrameString Segment="F000" Offset="E0C1" Value="M-815G"/>
</FrameDescription>


"Decoder Ring (Which one do you need).txt":

168xA/AD Win XP MY41000801-MY41000899 Radisys SC815E 01680-14100
MY41000901-MY41001099 Motorola VP22 01680-14104
MY41001101-later ADLINK M-815G 01680-14106

168xxA MY46000101-MY46000999 Intel D915GUX 16800-14102
MY46001000-later ADLINK M-880 16800-14103

16900A, 16902A MY43000001-MY43001999 Motorola VP22 16900-14109
MY43002000-later ADLINK M-815G 16900-14121

16901A MY46000101-MY46000399 Intel D915GUX 16901-14101
MY46000400-later ADLINK M-880 16901-14102

16902B All ADLINK M-880 16902-14100

16903A MY43000001-MY43000199 Radisys SC815E 16903-14100
MY43000200-MY43001999 Motorola VP22 16903-14104
MY43002000-later ADLINK M-815G 16903-14107

If your serial number starts with SG, then the same number ranges apply.
For example, SG43000001 is the same as MY43000001

On Sun, 24 Mar 2019 14:45:44 -0400, you wrote:

I purchased a fully loaded 16900A for quite a bargain recently. It has
(1) 16950B, 16M, 667MHZ state mode, and 4ghz timing zoom module. It also
has (5) 16910A's, 16M option, 500MHZ state mode option. The 16950B is
68-channels, and the 16910A's are 102-channels. I wasn't a math major,
but that's almost 600-channels of simultaneous capture.

A couple friends asked, what are you going to do with all those
channels? While truthfully I don't know, I can certainly do whatever the
heck I'd want to do with this beast!

Debugging I2C communications between microprocessors:

8 channels for data,
roughly 8 channels for status (start/stop/first byte, ack/nak, etc per
byte)
8 channels (roughly) for message byte count, resetting after a stop:

24 channels

Then you monitor anything that the I2C message was supposed to
trigger....


Now the 24 channels worth of data is parallel, state machine, and you
have to figure out how to take it apart.

Harvey


<snip>

Glen,

Thanks again for your comments.

Responses-inline.


On 3/24/2019 4:18 PM, Glen Slick wrote:

I don't remember having any problems when I tried using a Buslink
SPCI2P PCI-SATA card, which uses the Sil3112A. It might be that the
drivers are only preinstalled for that particular PCI device, and not
any other versions of Silicon Image PCI-SATA bridge chips. I'd have to
get set up to try the recovery installation process again to verify
that.

Yeah that's what you had said on the previous thread, which is why I opted for a Sil3114A. Surely the drivers are the same or close for the 3112 vs the 3114. It's possible that the 2-port version is part of the available upgrade kit, so they made to sure integrate those particular ones.

It wasn't the end of the world, just had to work around it. Like any of these related problems in IT.

Yes, you want to update to XP SP3, then install the .NET packages so
you can install the version 05.90.1104 analyzer application software.
The .NET package installation is one of the longest parts of the whole
system setup from scratch. A set up from scratch on a bare hard drive
can take a few hours to get everything installed.

It's just tedious because of the slow CPU. Even with SSD installed, the CPU was maxed at 100% for the most of the installation time. Definitely takes a couple hours in the best case circumstance. Installing XP from scratch is no picnic either.....in comparison to Win7/10 on a modern machine.

I picked up a few new bulk package Adaptec AUA-5100B PCI USB 2.0 cards
cheap on eBay. Those use the NEC uPD720101 (now Renesas), which is one
of the better USB 2.0 controllers from what I remember from my USB
development days. No problem getting that to work in the 16900A with
the preinstalled drivers. The Adaptec AUA-2000C appears to use the
same uPD720101 and those are also cheap in new bulk package condition
on eBay.

I think this would be worthwhile upgrade. I'll check out similar cards.

I believe GBit Ethernet card is just a standard Intel PRO/1000 XT
PCI-X card, plugged into a 32-bit slot, with a low profile bracket.

You're right. FWIW, when I used to specialize in Networking, Intel's cards were really only second to 3Com for drivers and support. These particular cards used to be really expensive back in the day!

One thing I did do is install an add-in AGP graphics adapter. Nothing
fancy, just wanted DVI output. I think it was an older passively
cooled VisionTek Radeon 7K. That's somewhat period appropriate for a
Windows XP system.

The default resolution works fine on VGA. I have a 4x3 monitor on the LA cart that I built by hand, attached to an adjustable monitor arm.

Thanks,
Keith

Glen,


On 3/24/2019 5:11 PM, Glen Slick wrote:

I finally found my recovery DVDs. The DVDs that I received as physical
copies from Agilent in the "Part Number: 16900-68722 16900A/16902A
Recovery DVD Kit" envelope are labeled "Logic Analyzer Recovery DVD
16900A and 16902A Only" / "Part Number: 16900-14121" on the DVD
itself.

Yeah, I was sent 16900-14121.ISO, and 16900-14122.ISO (for the BIOS upgrade). That's all I really needed for the 16900A.

I forgot that there is a different recovery DVD for the 16903A, part
number 16903-14107. I had to request an image for that one from
Keysight before it magically appeared (and quickly disappeared later)
on their FTP server.
Ah, now I remember even more. There used to be a handy text file on
their FTP server named "Decoder Ring (Which one do you need).txt"
which had the part numbers for the appropriate recovery media. On the
recovery media there is an XML file which has some hard coded values
to check in the BIOS for a match before the image restore will
proceed. While the same ADLINK M-815G motherboard is used in multiple
analyzers, it may have different analyzer dependent signatures in the
BIOS.

Thanks for that list. I saw you posted that on EEVBLOG too.

FWIW, those scripts are simply in some DOS batch files, which are easily modifiable in case there isn't a "hard match."

The recovery disks contain Norton .GHO and .GHS files that get combined to produce a single disk image. You can use those files directly without the need of any of their utilities. You can convert those to .ISO, or .VMDK for virtual machines, or really whatever you need.

I find the standardization and ease-to-decode files and file structure refreshing. I love being able to use the files beyond their original application.

Thanks,
Keith

On Sun, Mar 24, 2019 at 6:15 PM Keith Monahan via Groups.Io
<keith@...> wrote:

On 3/24/2019 4:18 PM, Glen Slick wrote:

I don't remember having any problems when I tried using a Buslink
SPCI2P PCI-SATA card, which uses the Sil3112A. It might be that the
drivers are only preinstalled for that particular PCI device, and not
any other versions of Silicon Image PCI-SATA bridge chips. I'd have to
get set up to try the recovery installation process again to verify
that.

Yeah that's what you had said on the previous thread, which is why I
opted for a Sil3114A. Surely the drivers are the same or close for the
3112 vs the 3114. It's possible that the 2-port version is part of the
available upgrade kit, so they made to sure integrate those particular ones.

I took a look at the 16903A on my bench at the moment. The driver and
.INF file that are preinstalled only include PCI Device & Vendor ID
matches for the Sil3112 and the Sil3512, but not the Sil3114.

I just looked around on eBay, Sil3112 and Sil3512 cards don't appear
to be common now. I can't imagine there would be any real demand for
them, but that never stops people from listing obsolete parts. I
bought my Sil3112 cards 4 or 5 years ago, a name brand Buslink SPCI2P,
and a generic one that I can't find a match for anywhere on the net
now. The generic one was actually the one I installed, the Buslink
SPCI2P one is still sealed in its antistatic bag.

Grant,

Please see responses in-line.


On 3/24/2019 5:37 PM, G Hopper wrote:

Keith,
I wasn't able to send this off list, but I'm curious about one (at least initially) thing:

That worries me as someone who runs their own mail server(s). Is it because you didn't change the groups.io deformation of my email address that used the = sign? You should be emailing keith at techtravels.org. If this doesn't work, please let me know. If you're getting a bounce message or something, I'd love to see it.

I'm guessing the original drive was PATA.

Yeah PATA IDE. ATA100 as they used(I?) to call it. The actual throughput of the drive was something like 95 MB/s.

? I'm trying to replace the drive (PATA) on a newer LeCroy scope (also running Win XP) with a SSD. The board (an Intel 865G chipset based board) supports SATA, but I'm space constrained for the drive as it uses a small bay at the rear of the scope to allow the drive to be removed/reinstalled quickly and the configuration doesn't appear to readily offer a way to convert the rear connector over to SATA.? I could mount the drive internally and give up removability, but I'd like to retain that feature if I can.? So obviously I'm wondering if what you did might offer some alternate ideas that might result in a solution for my situation.

Well, there's mountains of room inside my 16900. :)

I can't really help you mechanically. That 865G is a few years newer, and a heck of a lot more powerful, faster bus speeds, etc with the P4 vs my P3.

There were primarily two issues I faced regarding what you're talking about:

1. The BIOS did not, and still does not, recognize the presence of the SATA drive. This means there's no corresponding settings. There's also no settings about AHCI, presenting SATA as an IDE to the OS, and so on. I think a even slightly more modern mobo could have made things easier. You get USB 2.0 ports, SATA-integrated, much faster bus speeds, memory speeds, CPU speeds, and so on. I think you're sitting much more equipped to begin with to do this. On the whole, this was a minor problem.

2. XP did not have the integrated SATA drivers. This was the major issue. The hard drive interface drivers are installed DURING initial XP installation time (or during a re-installation, during a repair). Check your device manager and see if you see a properly installed SATA controller. Usually under the "IDE/ATA/ATAPI Controllers" heading. I'm thinking that if you have a properly installed SATA controller, and SSD especially that the BIOS recognizes, that simply switching the boot order, and then imaging (I like using DD in linux, but there's other cloning/imaging tools out there) IDE to SSD will probably work.

I think that you're much better equipped for this. I'd try it. I'd still expect there to be boot issues though. Be prepared to "bootcfg /rebuild" from some bootable dos disk/usb stick. There's a couple tricks along those same lines.

Give it a go, keep your IDE drive safe in case you have to revert, and then report back on your findings! ;)

Thanks again for sharing your experiences.

My pleasure! Glad to find like minded folks out there!

Keith

On Sun, Mar 24, 2019 at 6:22 PM Keith Monahan via Groups.Io
<keith@...> wrote:

Thanks for that list. I saw you posted that on EEVBLOG too.

FWIW, those scripts are simply in some DOS batch files, which are easily
modifiable in case there isn't a "hard match."

I spent some time figuring out how to modify the installation scripts
a while ago to do a recovery installation on a 1680 series. I was able
to get CD recovery image sets from someone at Keysight, but the
motherboard in my system didn't match any of the hard coded ID values
in the installation scripts.

The 1680 series has a floppy drive and I figured out that I could boot
from the floppy and run modified installation scripts from the floppy
to install the recovery images from the standard CDs. I also could
have modified the scripts on the CD images and recovered from modified
CDs.

Good thing I made some notes at the time. I wouldn't remember any of
the details now without notes.

Thanks Harvey!

Now what should I do with the other 554 channels? <big grin>

Keith

On Sun, 24 Mar 2019 23:00:42 -0400, you wrote:

Thanks Harvey!

Now what should I do with the other 554 channels? <big grin>

<sound of bits chasing each other.... a lot like crickets.....>

What I've found on the lower (16700 series) LA's is that the deep
capture is not as useful as you'd like. 2M samples X 16 or more
channels on the display would give a snail a run for its money.

You might want to use different blades for different tasks, I've only
got one blade in my 16702B, and that does it for most of what I need,
two pods for I2C and the rest for whatever I need. Monitoring the
result of an I2C transmission in another processor board could be
interesting.

And if your system is interrupt/keyboard driven, you could monitor a
complete event/message sequence/result and so on....

I may end up doing that, but I don't think I need quite so many
channels...

<grin>

Harvey

Keith


On 3/24/2019 8:57 PM, Harvey White wrote:

On Sun, 24 Mar 2019 14:45:44 -0400, you wrote:

I purchased a fully loaded 16900A for quite a bargain recently. It has
(1) 16950B, 16M, 667MHZ state mode, and 4ghz timing zoom module. It also
has (5) 16910A's, 16M option, 500MHZ state mode option. The 16950B is
68-channels, and the 16910A's are 102-channels. I wasn't a math major,
but that's almost 600-channels of simultaneous capture.

A couple friends asked, what are you going to do with all those
channels? While truthfully I don't know, I can certainly do whatever the
heck I'd want to do with this beast!

Debugging I2C communications between microprocessors:

8 channels for data,
roughly 8 channels for status (start/stop/first byte, ack/nak, etc per
byte)
8 channels (roughly) for message byte count, resetting after a stop:

24 channels

Then you monitor anything that the I2C message was supposed to
trigger....


Now the 24 channels worth of data is parallel, state machine, and you
have to figure out how to take it apart.

Harvey


<snip>

Responses in-line


On 3/24/2019 11:37 PM, Harvey White wrote:

On Sun, 24 Mar 2019 23:00:42 -0400, you wrote:

Thanks Harvey!

Now what should I do with the other 554 channels? <big grin>

<sound of bits chasing each other.... a lot like crickets.....>

Heh. I was mostly bragging because I'm excited about the possibilities! :) So forgive me!

What I've found on the lower (16700 series) LA's is that the deep
capture is not as useful as you'd like. 2M samples X 16 or more
channels on the display would give a snail a run for its money.

I've got a fully-loaded 16700 too. Yeah scrolling through those is a bit painful. I've done upwards of about 32-channels at a time. Most of the time, because the triggering is pretty decent, you don't need so many samples, you just need the RIGHT samples.

I had a 32-channel 500mhz USB model that only had 2000 sample memory depth. 2000 TRANSITIONS --- so long times between data was ok, like you find in serial data. I really thought it was going to be limited, but it wasn't horribly so. I did eventually "upgrade" to a 24mhz, but super deep (billions of samples), usb one..... and that was good for some things too.

They used to say, fast, cheap, deep, pick two.

Sometimes, though, I don't know exactly what I'm looking for.....so I'm collecting samples to look through and determine the possibilities....what common values might I be seeing.

You might want to use different blades for different tasks, I've only
got one blade in my 16702B, and that does it for most of what I need,
two pods for I2C and the rest for whatever I need. Monitoring the
result of an I2C transmission in another processor board could be
interesting.

Which blade do you have? 715A, 717A, 752A?

How do you decode the I2C? On the unit itself? I forget, was serial decoding an option?

I was exporting via FTP the flat data files from captures, and then using the latest Logic Analyzer 5.90 software on a faster machine to interpret them. Just much nicer using a modern PC...... I'm happy that the modern PC can now control and connect to the other LA remotely!

I may end up doing that, but I don't think I need quite so many
channels...
<grin>

Thanks! ;)
Keith

On Mon, 25 Mar 2019 00:06:43 -0400, you wrote:

Responses in-line


On 3/24/2019 11:37 PM, Harvey White wrote:

On Sun, 24 Mar 2019 23:00:42 -0400, you wrote:

Thanks Harvey!

Now what should I do with the other 554 channels? <big grin>

<sound of bits chasing each other.... a lot like crickets.....>

Heh. I was mostly bragging because I'm excited about the possibilities!
:) So forgive me!

Not a problem. I sometimes wonder what I'd do with all the channels.

What I've found on the lower (16700 series) LA's is that the deep
capture is not as useful as you'd like. 2M samples X 16 or more
channels on the display would give a snail a run for its money.

I've got a fully-loaded 16700 too. Yeah scrolling through those is a bit
painful. I've done upwards of about 32-channels at a time. Most of the
time, because the triggering is pretty decent, you don't need so many
samples, you just need the RIGHT samples.

Mostly what I'm doing is looking at the outputs of either an ARM
microcontroller or an FPGA for a moderately long pulse sequence, PWM
for LEDS, serial to an ESP8266 (whoever picked a variable length
serial data response for those things deserves to have to put them in
a system. A system with an operating system running them and NO flow
control).

I had a 32-channel 500mhz USB model that only had 2000 sample memory
depth. 2000 TRANSITIONS --- so long times between data was ok, like you
find in serial data. I really thought it was going to be limited, but it
wasn't horribly so. I did eventually "upgrade" to a 24mhz, but super
deep (billions of samples), usb one..... and that was good for some
things too.

I've got a 10 dollar 8 channel LA that does a remarkably good job of
decoding I2C and serial data. For debugging communications, that did a
good job, surprisingly better than my 56K baud maximum HP
communications analyzer. (I'm working at 115K baud to the ESP8266
WIFI chip).

However, the triggering isn't all that sophisticated, and it can't
take apart the I2C messages.

They used to say, fast, cheap, deep, pick two.

Yep.

Sometimes, though, I don't know exactly what I'm looking for.....so I'm
collecting samples to look through and determine the
possibilities....what common values might I be seeing.

sometimes I just don't know what's going on, so paying attention to
SPI data going in, data going out, that kind of thing helps a lot.

You might want to use different blades for different tasks, I've only
got one blade in my 16702B, and that does it for most of what I need,
two pods for I2C and the rest for whatever I need. Monitoring the
result of an I2C transmission in another processor board could be
interesting.

Which blade do you have? 715A, 717A, 752A?

717A I think. The 16555A that I can pirate from my 16500 is also
available, but I really don't quite need it unless I'm looking at two
systems.

Ironic that the 16510 has about the capability of the one 1661 LA that
I still keep if I need something more portable.

How do you decode the I2C? On the unit itself? I forget, was serial
decoding an option?

Serial decoding is an option to an extent, but I cheat. I use a CPLD
to go from I2C serial to a state machine. I number the bytes in the
CPLD, flag ack/nak for each byte, tag start and stop, etc. That was
the basis for a standalone I2C decoder that I built. Uses LM339
comparators for SCL, SDA and an interrupt line, uses the CPLD as a
oneshot for the activity led, shows me high and low stuck lines.

That's going to go into a more complicated FPGA as a logic analyzer
plugin to an existing project, so I will be putting that, two USARTS,
two FIFOs (1K*8) and likely a FIFO for the I2C stuff (24 bits * 1K).
It's up to the ARM processor to display data in state form. Of
course, I can also do timing as well, I guess. The LM339's are in
there to protect the FPGA, seriously.

I never saw an I2C decoding option in any of the 16700 series or
below.

I was exporting via FTP the flat data files from captures, and then
using the latest Logic Analyzer 5.90 software on a faster machine to
interpret them. Just much nicer using a modern PC...... I'm happy that
the modern PC can now control and connect to the other LA remotely!

Ah, I may end up doing that. I do PC programming in Pascal (Lazarus),
and depending on whether or not I get WIFI going on these projects, I
may end up with all the 488 bus stuff in the lab on WIFI. Likely will
be able to do that with I2C.

I've got one design with a small (320 * 240) color touchscreen, and an
add on board (when debugged) will allow me to go ahead and use an 8
inch VGA touchscreen.

Add in the processor, FPGA and the like and you've got a reasonably
nice debugging tool.

I may end up doing that, but I don't think I need quite so many
channels...

<grin>

Thanks! ;)

Quite welcome.

Harvey

Keith

开云体育

on my lecroy 6100 I replaced the hard drive with a PATA SSD. I think it was "transcend" brand.?Worked fine business. Just needed a cable converter and that was that. I did a write up on EEVblog somewhere. A few years ago