Pictures of the S/130 system I'm building up are at https://www.flickr.com/photos/131070638@N02
I think the last I posted here... the cpu was up and running, that was the first piece I refurbished. I took everything out of the rack and cleaned that up well, and the cpu has been remounted there. Yesterday I mounted the 6030 dual 8" floppy drive. It was squeaky clean inside and at power up everything does what it should. However, I can't proceed further with it as I have no media. The docs say it uses hard sector 8" floppies, which I believe I can find. However, it specifies 8 sectors/track hard sector floppies - and those I've never heard of. Maybe DG made them special just for their gear, or, maybe the drive or controller or software was smart enough to expect the more common 32 hard sector floppies and knew to only pay attention to every 4th sector hole ;) In any case, before I spend "real dollar$" on media, if anyone has a single piece of 8 sector hard sectored 8" media I'd love to get one for testing :) Getting the 6030 connected to the cpu took a lot of documentation reading. It would seem that DG didn't believe in anything plugging in to interface boards. Instead, interface boards went in the cpu with no external connectors. Then you wirewrap from the backplane from a given slot to one (of a stack) of paddle boards bolted to the rear of the cpu chassis. Those paddleboards have edge connectors, and that's where you connect the device cable. Fun stuff. I started digging in to refurbishing a 6125 mag tape unit to go with the above system. It has power supply issues. The schematics I have are similar but not 100% correct so some guessing was involved. Whenever I turned on the tape unit, any other things (shop light, oscilloscope, etc.) plugged in to the same circuit would start randomly turning off and on. That is not a good sign ;) Earth leakage... Checking the snubber circuit on the mains side of the transformer led me to suspect a mylar that sat between hot and neutral. I lifted one leg of it (just for testing) and that problem is definitely gone. Next problem is the power supply makes a loud ringing noise. I believe that's usually either ceramic disc capacitors or transformers, but I'm having a really hard time locating the exact source of the sound. I'm going to remove the power supply from the metal chassis and hook it up externally (that's how it goes in the rack anyways) and see if I can tell for sure that is the issue. Other than that, offline tests all work, so that will be racked up shortly and cabled to the S/130 cpu. Next on the list is refurbishing the DG 4084 dual cassette tape unit and racking that. Something tells me media will be unobtainium for that. Last step will be to refurbish and install a hard drive, most likely I'll use a 6050. So... some progress at least :) J