Hi. This is my HP 35 660, a Dynamics Signal Analyzer. You've seen this in previous videos and it's one of countless old-school bits. a kit you can score on eBay our auction houses or anywhere else that still are fantastic performing instruments and very, very useful.

You can get them dirt cheap, but often the problem comes if you want to actually talk to it with a PC because all these old-school stuff if and it wasn't invented USB wasn't invented. If you're lucky, it might have an old-school serial port which are with the string commands which makes it easier to talk to. But most instruments, especially our HP gear like this back in the day had the HP IB or the Hewlett Packard interface bus are also known as the GPIB the general-purpose interface bus also known as the I Triple E for double standard, which they're kind of. There are differences between them, but basically they're lumped into the same particular standard and that's really the only way to talk to these instruments.

And of course, it's been the de facto industry standard firm. Oh geez, I Don't know when was GPIB invented or HP I be invented? It's been around for a long time. Anyway, you'll find racks and racks of gear even today, all networked with GPIB as I'll call it anyway. Even modern gear like this size keysight over seven half digit meter.

It is backward compatible. They sell these to companies who often have these old racks and things and they need to actually um, interface those over and there. It is the GPIB interface that if you see that connector on an instrument, even if it doesn't have it written there, it's almost certainly GPIB. Of course this one has land and USB and and things like this old Philips System multimeter for example, let's have a look at that.

There you go GPIB System 21. I don't know what that is, that's probably some custom interface or something and this is just some of the other gear. I've got that side GPIB Controllable In my lab, this is my old Keithley Electrometer that is ancient GPIB interface. Brilliant! I've got my one of my which in current standards here I've got my Keithley battery simulator that Keithley source/measure unit up here.

Once again, this one actually does have Rs-232 and this is a classic. It's the industry standard or was the industry standard that source/measure unit. but unfortunately the problem is if you want to control these GPIB instruments, you usually need either a USB 2 GPIB converter which if you buy the genuine ones, can be quite expensive. There's a flourish in our second-hand market.

For those, you can also get of course plug in is a old school and PCI cards from our National Instruments or one of the big companies that do those cards. And yeah, they're fiddly. And also you've got the big, bulky, expensive GPIB cables as well if you've ever tried to use one of those. and then you've got to install the correct drivers for them and they might have an old card, an old adapt, or whatever.

The drivers might not work with the latest Windows 10 or Linux or whatever. and then you've got to have the software to actually talk to the driver and send the GPIB commands over and actually get something back from it. It's a really convoluted and pain-in-the-butt process. Well, what if you had something where you could just use your phone or your web browser to talk to your GPI instrument directly? That'll be cool.

Well what? So now here it is. This is the kiss for deployed from Haake Set H/x Engineering, Ll, Chx Engineering Comm I Checked in, there website was down so I'm not sure what the deal is there. Nice diecast casing GPIB connector on there and it's just got one of these Ethernet things. There'll be a little micro in there I'm not going to take it apart and do whatever.

It's got a couple of leads on there that can actually help you I configure it and know the status of it powered from a five volt USB here and it just plugs directly in to your instrument. No cable, no mucking around and you can talk to it just with a web browser. Brilliant! So I'm going to plug it into the back of my dynamic signal analyzer here and see if we can get it on our phone or a networked web browser. So this is connected via Wi-Fi to my around here.

So one of my viewers actually alerted me that this product has been a white around awhile 2017. So I picked up 150 Yankee bucks on eBay directly from the designer of this thing and it comes with a QuickStart guide, nothing on the back and a very comprehensive user guide and Kiss stands for keep it simple, stupid. But anyway, it's very comprehensive, especially in the various ways that you can actually connect to it. Net biased name lookup pings address DCP a DHCP server announce protocol auto IP network analyzer or a bigger hammer option which is just to actually read out the flashing LED on the thing which will give you the IP address.

Absolutely brilliant. Thought of everything and we're supposed to get a web interface. Let's give it a ball. So let's try the simplest solution which is the net biased name lookup HTTP No, none of that s rubbish.

in theory. don't have to look up the IP address. Other thing Neat. All right.

please excuse the crew D of this phone capture. Didn't have time to build it to scale or to paint it so let's put in that and see if we can get access. site cannot be reached Wow So while that was a fail on my phone, I can confirm that does work on my desktop web browser. Yeah, it could be a phone or an Android thingy.

So from the web browser I do actually know the IP address now so this should work. There we go. So yeah, that botnet biased domain name was Will There it is. There we go.

There's our Control that's actually a web served from the little web server inside the Kiss. 4 Double 8 itself. Version One Point Six four. You can apparently contact the author to get like new firmware versions and stuff.

We can go in there and now configure a direct. You can set the address here. you can set whether or not what file capture you want. HP Glck is another great thing about this is it basically emulates a plotter or a printer and so apparently you can get traces out of this thing.

So absolute brilliant. So anyway, I'm just armed command to trigger a screen capture. I'm just going to leave that as standard and you can set a Kiss address. I'm just going to leave all that as default.

We go over to Control Over here and this is our control page. There you go and we can have up to two, four, six different commands actually programmed into the thing now. or we can send them and you can save them into the embedded into the firmware of the thing itself and then they'll give you the reply from the instrument down here. So we do have to make sure our instrument is set up in this case.

addressable only analyzer address down here I've got it set to what 22 over here and then the peripheral addresses. We can actually set our plotter address and our printer address as well on the GPIB bus because the GPO every instrument on the GPIB bus has to given a unique identifier number. otherwise they conflict and there. All right.

So let's give this a try now. I'll keep it up there so you'll be able to see like remote and talked on here. so these should be able to see those annunciators our change if this is able to talk to it down here. So let's send the Asterix IDE ID in command.

Every GPI be instruments should understand that. But please be aware that there are massive differences between the command sets on GPIB instruments. So and like IDN is probably the only major universal one, so I'm gonna send that command and bingo remote. There you go.

Did it. Return the command? There it is down there. Winner winner chicken dinner. As you can see, it gives us the name of the product.

The model number looks like the serial number and the version number. That's a quite common this. so it works. Hunky-dory So we should now, in theory be able to get the programming manual for this DSA and actually send any sort of command.

but I've shown that it works so you know it's just fine. Let's try another instrument, try a more modern instrument here. Let's get this: a keysight, seven and a half digit meter and GPIB settings. There you go.

22. Let's just keep it the same: I have actually I reset anything I haven't reset the power to the kiss module I've just simply transferred the cable over to here and I haven't reset any of the firmware signs. Gonna give this a bell? Let's go send again and looks like it worked. Bingo! Key site.

It talks. no workers, It just works. It's brilliant. And once again, we got the name, the model number, the serial number, and it looks like our firmware versions as well.

So let's just try sending something. Evm. let's just I don't know It said that it just happens to be default in there. Let's see if it sends anything back reply from instrument.

Absolutely nothing because we're not sending the correct command. So yeah, I just thought I'd send that. why not? Let's actually do measurement measure test value to see if it actually just gives us some sort of default value back or something like that not seem to take too long. Nope, it didn't like that and you can see up there error.

So that's actually a GPIB command error. It didn't like that command. Of course we could go get the programming manual for this thing and type in the correct commands. Let's try and old a school will.

Real simple instrument like this. system multimeter again. that's address 22 so I won't touch anything. Haven't repaired anything, just send ID command.

That was pretty quick and Bingo. Whoa. Actually, that didn't work. He gave us the voltage.

so it this looks like this: South Philips 25:34 System Multimeter doesn't accept the IDN command, but it did return our voltage. Wow Okay, well, let's send this EVM command and Bingo! it's returning. Let's just send anything. measure, value, send that, and yep, it's just returning voltage every single time.

So that's just a real old-school GPIB interface by looks of it. Okay, I've hooked up a 10k resistor to that. Come on, see what we get out of that? Rtw Nine Point Nine Nine Six One plus ten to the plus three. So yep, that's Nine Point Nine Nine Nine Kay.

So you can send single commands like that, which is useful, but you can also do CAPTCHA which actually has a data logger built-in and I don't believe you need it actually connected to the PC. It saves it internally and then you can actually update it later. So unfortunately, it only has like a three seconds is the minimum log time and then you can put in a custom command there to actually do it. So let's actually select that and one points logged.

Three seconds later it should. two points locked. there. we go.

So it's actually login those values and I'll just put my fingers on here. Just give it a bit of a whirl there. unfortunately. Yeah, once every three seconds, I'm not sure what the limitation is there.

GPIB is that much faster than that? It is capable of going faster. So and what I'm going to do now is actually disconnect the Ethernet cable and see if it just keeps on logging. Okay, it's stopped updating of course because it can't actually connect to it. So I'll do some more wiggle-wiggle-wiggle year on the connector too, just to vary the values a bit and then I'll reconnect it and then we'll download the data.

I haven't tried this yet. I'm assuming it can data log internally so the Kiss module is still connected into the instrument, but the Ethernet cable is disconnected and I'll plug it back in. So let's see if it can just live connect like that. Let's see if it updates there.

it is 42 points logged. Yep. I think it kept going. Alright Beauty, let's just go directly over to Graphs.

Aha, there it is. That's what I had there and then you can select your different logs and there it is. This is where I pulled it out somewhere in here and I left it for a bit and then I started to fiddle around with it some more. So there you go.

We've done that. and then we can save that to a CSV file for further play. So that's kind of neat. It's got like a built in autonomous data logger.

Unfortunately, it's a bit in terms of you know data capture I don't know why and one second it'd be really handy. Oh, it's safe to. there's HTM I Thought it was a CSV See what we get? There we go. Raw raw data HTM No problem.

You can copy and paste that over too straight into Excel or your favorite spreadsheet. so that's very cool. You can just convert any old GPIB instrument into a web connected interface. Now of course this web interface is very cool, but ultimately you can only send these single commands like just a one-off type command.

You can't sequence anything. doesn't have any scripting or anything like that, but aha. It has a telnet interface down here which allows you to write your own programs, write your own scripts in any language that you want that supports a telnet interface which is like a virtual serial port interface to the thing and the designer. Steve Hendricks actually told me about some a program that a one of his customers has already written and here it is.

It's the GPIB Telnet data logger. I'll provide a link in down below for it and here it is connected to the instrument. I've had it running for a while here and I'm just measuring like art noise. So this is my new keysight seven and a half digit DMM and this is like the drift on warm up and you can see that so it's actually logging and there's no this particular logging application I Think like limits it to one second, but in theory you can write your own applications that sample it as fast as the GPI bus will allow.

so you can use any programming language you want. So it's just like having that PCI or USB GPIB interface with the drivers and then you know from the likes of National Instruments and other manufacturers that then talk to you know LabVIEW Lab, Windows CE, VI and and Visual Basic and I. Any program you like that has the driver available that actually supports that and this telnet interface and it just worked I didn't have to send anything up. Fantastic! So there you go.

You can write your own scripts and everything and I'm sure all the script kiddies out there can you know whip up a program in no time to talk through a tool net interface. Winner! And of course you should be able to connect using any simple terminal program as well as long as the supports are telnet. So I'm using tera term here in this particular case. So let's go in here.

telnet unspecified IP V4 and bingo we're in like Flynn and then we can just send commands up here. here we go send to this process Boom we're in Joshua Damn now. Unfortunately I couldn't get the screen the HP GL screen capture thing working with my HP Dynamics Signal analyzer. I've tried all sorts of things and I just cannot get it to capture it so I don't know if it's something as particular.

With my DSA I haven't got the time at the moment to try and get that, but suffice it to say that you can. Actually, if your product supports HP GTL output or a bitmap printer type output, you can actually capture that. So that's really cool for old-school instruments like this. DSA If you can actually get a screen captures, its got like a three and a half inch floppy on it and things like that and so old-school storage like that we still, you know is not great these days to try and get working.

And if you can capture, get screen captures to put in documentation and things like that. Absolutely fantastic. but unfortunately I can't get it working. but I'm sure it does work as Steve's got it on his website and you know it's screen captures and things like that.

I'm just probably doing something dumb if I do get it working. I might update you on the second Eevblog to channel and you can potentially configure like a screen capture command in here. a GPIB command in there and then when you're in the capture part, you can just go screen capture. It'll execute that and it will extract the file out and then you go over to graphs here and you should be able to actually select your bitmap or HP GL file over here.

but as you can see, it didn't work, it's just blank. And here's an example of the extra resolution I was telling you about. I've got my ancient but awesome. Still almost unmatched these days.

doesn't awesome tear down video of this. It's really fascinating anyway. Keithley Six months seven Programmable Electrometer. Only four decimal is here, but have a look over there.

we've got some extra digits on there. Let's see if we get there. We go 102. There you go.

So there's some decent extra resolution to be had from your instrument here. So there you go. That's really worthwhile, just that alone to get extra resolution out of instruments like this. So anyway, I think that's very cool and well worth the money.

Yeah, if you're into old instruments like this, I've done an example of: Um, I don't have it anymore I sold it on eBay But an old HP multimeter that you can actually extract an extra digit of resolution from it if you actually got the reading over the GPIB So you know what valuable stuff like that. So you turn like a a 7.5 digit meter into an eight-and-a-half digit meter. Not all meters are like this, of course, if you extracted it over the GPIB instead of just on the display. So anyway, I Think that's pretty cool concept.

It simply just works. I Have been playing around with it and there. There's been a few times where it's like it doesn't respond and things like that. if I actually change like modes on the like GPIB modes and addresses and stuff like that and the kinda gets mixed up and not so much locked up if you like to treat it wrong and stuff like that.

But once you if you've got the right address and everything works then it's it's just. it works great. So I'm quite impressed by this thing. I think it's really quite a neat thing and it's well worth having if you got some old instruments like this.

So anyway, I'll put in a link down below and you can buy it on eBay or maybe directly from the website. The website gets back up and running, but hope you like that if you did, please give it a big thumbs up. And as always can discuss down below. catch you next time.