This is an interesting little gadget I picked up at surplus. I wasn't really expecting it to be as useful as it is, I just saw a bunch of buttons and a display and thought "ooo pretty". But once I took it home and looked into it, I discovered that it's actually programmable via a version of QBASIC, and it can do pretty much anything you want it to. It has a display backlight, key backlights, all of the keys, etc., are *fully* programmable, and it has two serial interfaces.
We start out with it being put together and powered up. As I flip it over, you can see that there's a bunch of useful info on the back, such as pinouts. As I open it up, you can see that there's a DIP switch on the power/IO board (I haven't figured out what it does, but I think it's related to the e-stop button functionality you can find on the screw terminals). As I take that off... it's directly soldered to the display, but underneath is quite interesting. You'll notice that the key backlight is actually powered by one LED and a bunch of fiber optics (I've never seen that before). There's a controller, some memory, and two custom chip boards that I've never seen before.
The firmware is entirely upgradable (and available on their website still), and I'm trying to decide whether it would be worthwhile to reverse engineer it to figure out how the thing is architected. I'm leaning towards no, but also towards "put it on my list of things to do when I get a round tuit). Either way, it's still pretty useful.
Oh, and the last pic is just an aside, I've decided all of my test equipment gets googly eyes.
Anyone interested in a teardown of the Tek TDS 340A? It's my primary scope so I won't take it too far apart, but I'll be glad to show you the guts, anyway.
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