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Just thought I'd post up some pictures of this purpose built 97S I got 4 years ago (Bob P!). I have never seen any mention or reference to it, but I may have missed it over the years.

Photo 1

Photo 2

Photo 3

That's an interesting item!

How does the communication work - software wise - between the 97s and the micrometer. Do you set one of the user flags to indicate that the micrometer should feed a measurement to the 97s?

What sort of electronics are in the box that's between the i/o pod connector and the micrometer?

I haven't rebuilt the card reader to run the cards yet. I plan to soon. I'll scan the manual.

Check these photos out of the internals of the adapter:

Photo 1

Photo 2

Photo 3

How do I embed a photo anyways?

All 4000 series CMOS chips, same as used in the i/o pod. While pretty standard stuff for back then, I wonder if the HP engineers had a hand in designing this too.

The 2 main chips, 40108, were likely used to buffer serial data from the micrometer so that it could be feed to the BCD inputs on the i/o pod in one shot. The i/o pod did just the opposite, taking the BCD digits on the input, one at a time, and feeding them to the 97s.

The tan muffler was originally the case for a 9815A I/O card. It's a BCD interface muffler from all appearances, which makes sense since we're dealing with simple numeric data here and an HP97S came with a BCD interface, using the 9815A muffler as a backfit. The micrometer has a numeric display so the data is clearly available as BCD info, which swims down the coil cord into the big kludge of an I/O box. I'm guessing the little gray box is a level translator and a serial-to-parallel BCD converter and latch to make the scanned micrometer digits available in parallel to the 97S BCD interface box. What a great lashup.

--Steve

(02-05-2016 07:35 AM)Katie Wasserman Wrote: [ -> ]That's an interesting item!

How does the communication work - software wise - between the 97s and the micrometer. Do you set one of the user flags to indicate that the micrometer should feed a measurement to the 97s?

What sort of electronics are in the box that's between the i/o pod connector and the micrometer?