Computer to do it all?

Yes, but I'd strongly recommend that you just use a cheap USB data acquisition card (e.g.,

OK, unless you really did want to turn your DOS laptop into a permanent test machine I guess...

---Joel Kolstad

It's certainly do-able !

Yes. You'll need those skills to do it from scratch.

It's possible to use some 'off the shelf' instrumentation products to do what you want though.

Graham

Easy as can be! Just decide what checkers appear on your "learning table", learn their functionality inside out, and devise an interface cirquit to talk, (one way/two way-chose one) to the possible computer ports (serial; parralel; networking; USB; Firewire and so on). Not easy! Obtain discarded checkers of manufacturers, with some computer interface and incorporate them in your system.

Have fun

Stanislaw Slack user from Ulladulla.

Programming for the ports in DOS is pretty easy, unless you're trying to write interrupt handlers.[1] ;-)

You'll have to get some kind of technical reference, of course, but that should be a trivial google search.

Good Luck! Rich [1] I once decided to write a "dumb terminal" in C, on a DOS machine with a modem - it was to talk to a BBS, a "bulletin board system", which is just basically a discussion group, like Matt Wright's wwwboard, or a one-node newsgroup. Anyway, I wound up using Microsoft CodeVies to hack into Telix or Procomm and lifted their interrupt handler.

Thanks! Rich

On Wed, 12 Jul 2006 20:40:13 -0700, snipped-for-privacy@dcn.davis.ca.us Gave us:

If the tube checker or other such device is old, it likely has no method for outputting its collected data to another device.

On Thu, 13 Jul 2006 04:00:34 GMT, Stanislaw Flatto Gave us:

Good advice.

Still, an old "tube checker" will be hard to develop a data collect / transmission / translation device for.

Of course practically even the simplest computer could do the job. Even a 286. The problem rests with interfacing to old hardware, and doing so without changing the circuit you attempting to monitor.

Parallel port is a bad choice though. Particularly with the old interface cards of the past, and the new busses available these days.

Hell, use Linux, and Ruby on Rails!

Someone designed and sells a conversion kit to computer control the old Hickok "Cardomatic" tube testers. news:rec.antiques.radio+phono is where a lot of early radio & TV collectors hang out.

There are also units that have a ADC and a serial port (not USB) this can be easier to work with because all you need to do is learn how to work with a serial port. The low level driver issues don't come up.

In article , Rich Grise wrote: [...]

Even interrupts aren't all that hard under DOS. It is debugging them that is troublesome. You have to be very careful about the writing to that you don't have much debugging to do.

The Borland "TD" debugger could do a breakpoint in a interrupt routine.

Thanks everyone. It is amazing how many ways there are to do something if you just ask. Keep up the good work and thanks to all for the responses.

Don