[Techtoolslist] Fluke 9110FT SPECTRUM-TX diskettes imaged

[Ian Eure]

Following up on this.  I tried setting everything up, and got some
promising signs, but haven’t been able to get it fully working.  I’m
dumping what I figured out in the hopes that someone else can give it
a shot, or come up with some suggestions for me to try.

The only 9100 with GPIB I have with actually is a 9110FT, which is
perfect for this -- there shouldn’t be any issues due to using the
wrong mainframe.

First thing I did is set up GPIB on it.  This process is kind of a
hassle.

1. Boot a service disk, select CONFIGURE, and make sure IEEE is
   enabled.  Power cycle the mainframe.
2. Install the IEEE-411 feature disk.  Use the COPY function, selecing
   DR1 as the source and HDR as the destination.
3. Go into the setup menu, pick ON BOOT, select IEEE, select ENABLED.
   Hit ENTER/YES.
4. Make sure a pod is connected, then power-cycle the mainframe.
5. Go into SETUP, press MORE SOFTKEYS, and there should be a new IEEE
   softkey.  Configure it like the SPECTRUM-TX readme.txt says:
   address 3, talker/listener, no terminator.
6. Install the SPECTRUM-TX software the same way as the feature disk,
   with COPY.
7. Run TS_INIT.  From the operator’s keypad, press EXEC.  If there’s a
   UUT name filled out, press CONT to erase it -- this selects PROGLIB
   instead of a UUT directory program.  Then press HELP, select
   TS_INIT, accept the default arguments, and hit ENTER/YES.  This
   initializes SPECTRUM-TX for the attached pod.  If you change pods,
   you need to repeat this process.
8. Run TS_CLIFF, the same way as TS_INIT.  The 9100 should say "Under
   PC Control (9110TX Ver. 1.0)".

That’s it for the 9100 end of things.

Since I don’t have another 9100 with GPIB, I don’t know if this works
on a 9100 or 9105.  I tried it on a 9100A just to see what happened,
but it didn’t work.  TS_INIT did its thing, but running TS_CLIFF
errored with an "option not installed" message.  I assume this is just
referring to the GPIB interface, but I can’t confirm.


On the PC end, I used a rackmount Pentium MMX 233mhz machine.  This is
the only PC I have with ISA slots. It’s a 233mhz Pentium MMX, and
normally runs plain MS-DOS 6.22.  I installed Windows for Workgroups
3.11 so I could try this out.

I bought a National Instruments GPIB-PCII/IIA, because it seems to be
supported and was the cheapest I could find on eBay ($22 shipped).
The driver for this (and many other NI GPIBs) is called "NI-488.2",
and version 2.6 supports Windows 3.  They still host it on their
website, along with nice PDF manuals, so kudos to them.

The NI driver package includes a hardware self-test, which I verified
was passing (after moving some other hardware around so I could
allocate it an IRQ).

After that, I installed SPECTRUM-TX.  The installer is goofy.  There
are two programs, one called SETUP.EXE, for DOS, and one WSETUP.EXE
for Windows. SETUP.EXE entirely doesn’t work, but WSETUP.EXE only
mostly doesn’t work.  They both copy a very few files to the hard
disk;  WSETUP also creates Program Manager icons for SPECTRUM-TX, but
they all point to files on the floppy disk.  I ran WSETUP.EXE, then
copied everything from the floppy into the install directory and
updated the Program Manager entries to point there.

Okay, so all that done, cable connected, I ran TS_CLIFF on the Fluke
and SPECTRUM-TX on the PC.

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Unfortunately, the Windows program says it can’t communicate with the
Fluke.  When you launch the Windows program, the Fluke display changes
to "REMOTE CONTROL IN PROGRESS" -- so it received the right command
from the PC.  And when you hit the OK button on the PC, the Fluke
resets back to the main display, so it’s got to be receiving something
from the PC telling it to do that.  They’re definitely talking, but
something isn’t right from the PC’s perspective.

Maybe it’s supposed to run off the floppy and messing around with file
locations broke things?  I figured this was something I could try, so
I deleted the SPECTRUM-TX stuff off the hard disk and tried installing
again, but WSETUP.EXE crashes now.  I guess the Windows installation
is balled up, but I don’t have the time to reinstall it and start
over again tonight.

Maybe it actually only works with an AT-GPIB card?

Maybe there’s a delay loop which no longer works, because it runs 10x
faster than it’s supposed to?

  -- Ian


Martin Olsson writes:

> Hi all!
>
> I bought a Fluke 9110FT setup and with that setup came the SPECTRUM-TX diskettes which I now have imaged and uploaded to the "/TTL/Test_Equipment/Fluke/9100 Series" folder on John's FTP site.
>
> Inside the ZIP archive is a ReadMe with more details about the images etc. I haven't tested the images myself but I think they should probably work as the original diskettes was error free.
>
> Enjoy!
>
>
> /Martin!
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