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HP 1661A Logic Analyzer

M

Marty

Veteran Member
Joined
Jul 26, 2009
Messages
3,141
Location
Boulder , Colorado USA
Hi All;
I just got an HP 1661A Logic Analyzer, and I am wondering If anyone knows anything about these beasts ?? The Local Electronics Store was having their Christmas Sale and I got this unit.. For better or for worse, I hope it will help get the PDP 11/40 and PDP 11/45 going again.. There is no instruction Booklet and I didn't see anything on BitSavers..
THANK YOU Marty
 
Marty said:
Hi All;
I just got an HP 1661A Logic Analyzer, and I am wondering If anyone knows anything about these beasts ?? The Local Electronics Store was having their Christmas Sale and I got this unit.. For better or for worse, I hope it will help get the PDP 11/40 and PDP 11/45 going again.. There is no instruction Booklet and I didn't see anything on BitSavers..
THANK YOU Marty
Click to expand...

See: http://ecee.colorado.edu/~mcclurel/HP1662A_users_ref.pdf and grab it.

Don
 
Hi All;
AK6DN, Thank You for the Link..
I will look thru this manual and find out How to turn on this thing, among other things..
I also got 3 bags of Ic's, Hopefully something I can use.. Their getting ready for end of the Year Inventory, anything they don't have to count..
THANK YOU Marty
 
Marty said:
Hi All;
I just got an HP 1661A Logic Analyzer, and I am wondering If anyone knows anything about these beasts ?? The Local Electronics Store was having their Christmas Sale and I got this unit.. For better or for worse, I hope it will help get the PDP 11/40 and PDP 11/45 going again.. There is no instruction Booklet and I didn't see anything on BitSavers..
THANK YOU Marty
Click to expand...
I have the little brother of your machine, HP1664A. Only 32 channels. Not very modern. But very easy to work with. Today I for example found a bad 7408 AND gate on the DL11-W board that prevented it to clear the interrupt as it should. This wouldn't be possible without the HP1664A.

I hope that you got all the pods and clips/grabbers etc with your machine.

This is for example the unibus interrupt sequence caught on the HP1664A:
Unibus-ok.png
 
I'm confident you'll find it will be of great help to you. Hopefully it came with the cable & probe set.
 
Hi All;
Matislind, Thank You for the Information.. "Not very modern." Its probably newer than the piece of equipment You are working on.. And it does the Job..
According to the Manual that I downloaded, I am not sure I would want the 1664, since it says it loads from Floppy, IF I am reading correctly.. Fortunately, mine has the Proms instead of floppy.. But, we work with what we have.. I am glad You found Your Bad Ic, is the basic machine real easy to set up ?? I hope that is exactly what I plan on doing with mine, finding any bad Ic's, at first.. And later seeing what its waveforms are like..
I got plenty of Grabbers and two Pods, which is all that I need.. Usually in the past I haven't gotten the Grabbers.. There are cables for 4 more pods, but they (the pods) didn't come with the machine..
THANK YOU Marty
 
Last edited:
Marty said:
Hi All;
Matislind, Thank You for the Information.. "Not very modern." Its probably newer than the piece of equipment You are working on.. And it does the Job..
According to the Manual that I downloaded, I am not sure I would want the 1664, since it says it loads from Floppy, IF I am reading correctly.. Fortunately, mine has the Proms instead of floppy.. But, we work with what we have.. I am glad You found Your Bad Ic, is the basic machine real easy to set up ?? I hope that is exactly what I plan on doing with mine, finding any bad Ic's, at first.. And later seeing what its waveforms are like..
I got plenty of Grabbers and two Pods, which is all that I need.. Usually in the past I haven't gotten the Grabbers.. There are cables for 4 more pods, but they (the pods) didn't come with the machine..
THANK YOU Marty
Click to expand...
You are absolutely right, it loads from a floppy. It takes some time, but is not a major drawback. I have backups for the floppies. Of course if I would find a 1660 or 1661 here in Sweden I would buy it if the price was right. I think the big advantage is that those have plenty of more channels. 32 channels is quite limiting. It would be nice to have the full address and data bus and the microcode address in the same trace. Or possibly the output from the pipeline register!
Indeed it does the job, I think it is better than the USB dongles that I have tested. I prefer knobs and buttons rather than menus. I fully agree that the age is not of any concern at least for us where the speed is a few megahertz.
 
I have a HP-1631 and use it a lot, one of those things that you spend hours or days setting up a test, do the test and then spend more time trying to interpret the information. Thing is that nothing else will take its place when it comes to looking at events relative to the system clock. Think the 1661 is newer then anything you’re going to be working on so no issues with its capabilities. One thing I found real useful is to take and use it first looking at clock and timing stuff and get to how it works before attempting to use it for real. I use my so infrequently that I always set up something before using it for real just to familiarize myself with its operation before performing a real test.
 
Hi All;
QBus, Thank You for the information and suggestions and on Running trial runs.. Yea, I am sure that this is way newer than my /40..
THANK YOU Marty
 
Also, have a look at the Agilent web site, they have lots of documents for older HP equipment there.
 
Yes the 1631 has the dual channel scope but it’s a first generation digital scope that’s good for looking at digital signals but not to good for complex analog stuff, have a tek TDS 1002 digital for that but still have times that I will pull an old analog bottle out. But considering what you can pick up a HP1631 for it’s not a bad old box and the two channel scope looks good when looking at clock and timing stuff.
 
Hi All;
QBus, I have the TDS 1012 and I do like it, But I have plenty of older scopes, I have not used my older Scopes in quite awhile.. So my Question is when IS the older scopes better than the new or so called Newer scopes (TDS) ?? Maybe I'm missing something I didn't know or realize, while working on my 11/40 ..
THANK YOU Marty
 
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