HP1630 Analyzer questions..

I'm not familiar with the 1630, but most HP instruments will let you control pretty much everything via GPIB. If the card you buy is from National Instruments, you will be able to download tons of drivers and support/programming literature from

The NI PCI-GPIB is a great way to go.

Given the popularity of the 1630, I'd imagine that some time spent in Google will reveal plenty of control software options. At a minimum, you should certainly be able to obtain a screen dump from it. Quite a few free/shareware/inexpensive commercial utilities for plotter emulation are available, including mine (see

~jmiles1/ke5fx/7470.htm ). The source code at that link should be a good starting point for writing your own, if it comes to that.

-- jm

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I have looked around a lot for any support for the 1630 logic analyzers GPIB interface.

Not much seems to be online anywhere.

I have heard of the Z80 inverse assembler for the 1630 but could never find a copy.

The closest I have got it the 10391B Inverse Assembler Development Package. This package comes with the source code for 8085 and 68010 inverse assemblers.

Using this package to create an inverse assembler is a non trivial task. I used it to do a very simple protocol parser on an HP16500B logic analyzer main frame. It was an "interesting" experience.

You may want to find a disc drive unit for your 1630 like the HP 9121 D/S Flexible Disc Drive. The HP 9121S is a single 3-l/2 inch flexible disc drive and the HP 9121D is a dual 3-l/2 inch flexible disc drive. The disc unit will allow you to load inverse assemblers and store analyzer captures. When attached to a disc unit the 1630 can act as the GPIB controller. Later version of HP logic analyzers cannot do this.

A utility (LIFUTIL.EXE) is available that lets a PC read and write these discs. The MSDOS disc format was not supported by HP until the 16500B and

1660 series were released.

All in all you just might do better by making a simple GPIB interface program that can download the capture buffer and let you disassemble it on your PC.

Hi

I would highly recommend the GPIB card if you want to set up some repetitive tests. I dont have the 1630 I got a HP16500B instead. I have the HP16531A oscope card for it and I can suck the traces off of it. You can also save a screen shot to the disk and pull the GIF file off of the machine with GPIB ( no floppy transfers needed ). I am using the HP E2050 GPIB to LAN gateway box (also off ebay). Then you can have the GPIB box far away from your computer and you dont need an $$ >10ft GPIB cable.

I am not a big fan of NI Lab view. If you want to own a legitimate copy it is expensive! You can write C-code using the NI GPIB API drivers or you can get open source code that provide examples and a support group ( and free )

the documentation of the GPIB drivers API is on

Instrument GPIB programming syntax is often available on the Agilent web site. If not buy the programming manual on Ebay. GPIB programming is easy if you know C code.

I dont use C-code cause a friend wrote a Perl module that lets me use Perl to program GPIB instead. No compiling needed.

Good Luck with the dissassembly stuff

Jeff

snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote:

Hi,

I just put some software I wrote for my HP1631A up on sourceforge:

You need linux-gpib and a GPIB card. The hp1630 utility will let you obtain screen dumps from the analyzer and convert them to usable image formats, save/restore configuration, and even convert state/timing traces to DECSIM ascii format for off-analyzer analysis with dinotrace.

Have a look and let me know what you think.

Regards,

Jim

Jeff Meyer wrote: