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Ampro Little Board Plus and SmartWatch

D

dittman

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Jul 31, 2017
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Plano, TX
I have an Ampro Little Board Plus that I've done the mod listed in the smartclk.asm source and installed a No-Slot Clock from Reactive Micro.

This worked for quite a while, then I didn't use it for a couple of weeks. When I did power it on again and ran SMARTCLK I got the error message "error reading SmartWatch".

I got busy and didn't have a chance to look at it. Tonight I opened it up and found a bent pin on the No-Slot Clock. I thought it probably had just made intermittent contact before and had worked a little loose. I straightened the pin, reinstalled everything, and tested. I was able to set and read the clock with SMARTCLK.

I screwed everything back together and powered it back up and tested again. Everything worked. I disconnected the console and power cable, moved it from the desk back to the shelf it sits on, connected the console and power, and started it up. Now I'm getting the "error reading SmartWatch" message. This is puzzling me. It's in the Integrand case so it's a bit of a pain to take it all apart for debugging, so I thought I'd throw it out there to see if anyone had any ideas why it's doing this before I put it back on the desk and tear it apart again.
 
Alphasite said:
I have an Ampro Little Board Plus that I've done the mod listed in the smartclk.asm source and installed a No-Slot Clock from Reactive Micro.

This worked for quite a while, then I didn't use it for a couple of weeks. When I did power it on again and ran SMARTCLK I got the error message "error reading SmartWatch".

I got busy and didn't have a chance to look at it. Tonight I opened it up and found a bent pin on the No-Slot Clock. I thought it probably had just made intermittent contact before and had worked a little loose. I straightened the pin, reinstalled everything, and tested. I was able to set and read the clock with SMARTCLK.

I screwed everything back together and powered it back up and tested again. Everything worked. I disconnected the console and power cable, moved it from the desk back to the shelf it sits on, connected the console and power, and started it up. Now I'm getting the "error reading SmartWatch" message. This is puzzling me. It's in the Integrand case so it's a bit of a pain to take it all apart for debugging, so I thought I'd throw it out there to see if anyone had any ideas why it's doing this before I put it back on the desk and tear it apart again.
Click to expand...

Any possibility the battery may have gone flat?
 
dittman said:
I have an Ampro Little Board Plus that I've done the mod listed in the smartclk.asm source and installed a No-Slot Clock from Reactive Micro.

This worked for quite a while, then I didn't use it for a couple of weeks. When I did power it on again and ran SMARTCLK I got the error message "error reading SmartWatch".

I got busy and didn't have a chance to look at it. Tonight I opened it up and found a bent pin on the No-Slot Clock. I thought it probably had just made intermittent contact before and had worked a little loose. I straightened the pin, reinstalled everything, and tested. I was able to set and read the clock with SMARTCLK.

I screwed everything back together and powered it back up and tested again. Everything worked. I disconnected the console and power cable, moved it from the desk back to the shelf it sits on, connected the console and power, and started it up. Now I'm getting the "error reading SmartWatch" message. This is puzzling me. It's in the Integrand case so it's a bit of a pain to take it all apart for debugging, so I thought I'd throw it out there to see if anyone had any ideas why it's doing this before I put it back on the desk and tear it apart again.
Click to expand...

I have a Z80 Little Board (not Plus) and am interested in where you found smartclk.asm and if this mod. would also apply to my earlier version of this board too. I'm still working through disk drive issues, but now believe my problem may be a defective ribbon cable. Replacement is on order.

Don
 
The source was on one of the Ampro disks I got from the Maslin archives IIRC.

I don't believe this is supported on the original boards.
 
dittman said:
The source was on one of the Ampro disks I got from the Maslin archives IIRC.

I don't believe this is supported on the original boards.
Click to expand...

Drat!

but I'm a long way from modifying my L.B. since I'm still debugging the two floppy drives and finishing off the assembly into a nice twin SCSI drive case. Also, my Ampro ZCPM disks are FUBAR and useless. I do have a partial copy of the CP/M 2.2 disks with 99% of the utilities, but no Modem7 or other terminal program. I think some of the missing things are on a Walnut Creek CD I have, but it needs a DOS machine to de-archive them. Not one of the first things on a long list of things to do. One step forward and two steps back, no wait, that should be two steps forward and ????
 
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