![\"IMG_2269\"](\"http:\/\/paulcarbone.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/IMG_2269.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nBehold the Tektronix 7D01, first released in 1977, shown here with it’s companion display formatter.\u00a0 As a side note, I really need a better lens.\u00a0 This pin-cushioning is just too much.\u00a0 105mm or 200mm prime macro (or micro as Nikon calls them) is high on the list.<\/p>\n This wasn’t Tektronix’s first bench-top logic device, but it was the first to have a tiny bit<\/em> of smarts to it.<\/p>\n Hewlett Packard had a jump on the bench-top logic analysis tools, starting in 1973 with the 5000A logic state analyzer.\u00a0 It’s no WOPR, but a respectable display of blinking lights nonetheless.<\/p>\n By 1975, they had released several bench-top products.\u00a0 The HP Memory project has a great page<\/a> on the topic.<\/p>\n Back to the 7D01.\u00a0\u00a0 I’d picked it up a few months ago, and separately picked up one of the two 8 channel probes.\u00a0 The probe connections are to the left of the word recognizer.\u00a0 Note most logic analyzers are useless without their probes, and the probes are usually specific to one product or product family.\u00a0 You can pick up this and other 80’s era logic gear for under $100, but be prepared to spend a comparable amount on a set of probes.<\/p>\n So I started mucking about with it, generating test sequences from an Arduino and learning out how to operate the thing, and saw a variety of intermittent failures:<\/p>\n Here’s the character generator on the display formatter losing it’s mind: Some extreme jitter in the display of the timing diagram: Here’s a quick video of one failure mode, this time with the display formatter removed.\u00a0 Notice the characters look different, more on this later.<\/a><\/p>\n\n
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