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Dec RK8E controller for RK05 wanted

That is a Philips TX400, nicknamed "dog house". The very first commercial TV receiver from Philips.
Roland will no doubt chime in to correct me !....

Nice work on the RK05 Roland, happy to see it working. I still need to start on my remaining RK05's...
 
jackrubin said:
Very nice work all around, including the slooow baud rate on the VT05.

Now, please tell us a little more about the television next to the terminal!
Click to expand...

Yeah the VT05 is slow. It's set on 300 Baud. 2400 Baud works also but
some characters are skipped after commands like linefeed. According the
VT05 manual it needs Null (0000000) filler characters after some commands.
I've made a little posting with a question how to set OS/8 to make use of these
fill characters. But I haven't solved that yet...

About the TV. That is a Philips TX594 with 9" crt. After world war 2 Philips setup their radio and TV production again.
In 1949 Philips used 150 of these prototype sets to test with TV broadcasting. The sets were placed
at Philips employees to test. They had to report things like receiving quality etc...
The set was called "The little dog" (Het hondje). Because it's round back it looks like a sitting dog.
The first commercial model is the TX400 which is called the doghouse like Jos mentioned.

(Left the TX594 and right the TX400)
Philips TX594U 01.jpg Philips TX400U 01.jpg

Before the war we had mr Kerkhof which was a ham radio amateur and a TV pioneer.
He wrote a book about how to build a TV. Since none of them survived I've started to
read his book and started to build the TV. (Dutch story)
And a little demo on youtube: https://youtu.be/mTYpPpfRZS8

So it's not only old computers over here... :D

jdreesen said:
Nice work on the RK05 Roland, happy to see it working. I still need to start on my remaining RK05's...
Click to expand...

Hi Jos,

I'm very happy with the drive, so thanks again! To be honest I didn't expect to have it running by now.
And I guess I was very lucky that I could buy that Plessey controller which David mentioned.
Without that I would not have that drive running by now.

Regards, Roland
 
Roland Huisman said:
I've made a little extension cable on the battery terminals of the RK05.
Now I can connect a 4.8V NiMH battery outside the drive.
I don't like batteries in equipment... You never know when they start leaking...
Click to expand...
Roland: I know that it's been half-a-decade but ... could you tell us a bit more specifics about your solution, please? Maybe a photo or two. Do you just let the RK05 charging circuit drive the NiMH pack directly?
 
Roland Huisman said:
Yeah the VT05 is slow. It's set on 300 Baud. 2400 Baud works also but
some characters are skipped after commands like linefeed. According the
VT05 manual it needs Null (0000000) filler characters after some commands.
I've made a little posting with a question how to set OS/8 to make use of these
fill characters. But I haven't solved that yet...
Click to expand...
Solved yet? The referenced thread seems to have disappeared. Not having any luck searching the VCF forums.
 
pbirkel@gmail.com said:
Solved yet? The referenced thread seems to have disappeared. Not having any luck searching the VCF forums.
Click to expand...
Yes, solved this with the M8655 which has a jumper for filler characters especially for the VT05. So it is running at a stunning 2400 baud now :love:

About the battery: I've placed that nimh battery just outside the RK05 to prevent leakage in the drive... Nothing special. This was in my first RK05 drive. Now I have 5 of these drives up and running... I've been thinking about using a USB powerbank instead. Most of the time these drives are just doing nothing here... So the nimh batteries don't get charged. The self discharge might be a problem when you don't use the drives for a while.

Regards, Roland
 
Roland Huisman said:
Yes, solved this with the M8655 which has a jumper for filler characters especially for the VT05. So it is running at a stunning 2400 baud now :love:
Click to expand...
Thanks for pointing that out. I didn't know much about this module other than it was a UART-based successor to the M8650. Found the online documentation now. Have never seen one "in the wild".

Roland Huisman said:
About the battery: I've placed that nimh battery just outside the RK05 to prevent leakage in the drive... Nothing special.
Click to expand...
There's a variety of references online to this topic. Some examples:

Your experience is that NiMH battery packs works fine with the existing RK05 charging circuit then?
 
pbirkel@gmail.com said:
Thanks for pointing that out. I didn't know much about this module other than it was a UART-based successor to the M8650. Found the online documentation now. Have never seen one "in the wild".
Click to expand...
In my experience the M8655 is more common than the M8650. I would like an M8650 but when I see one they go for premium prices. I have two M8655 and they seem to go for more reasonable prices. If you are going to use one of these as a "Virtual Disk Device" using Kyle's Serial Disk or my Console Serial Disk then the M8650 is the more desirable board because you can overclock it to 115.2k baud while the M8655 is limited to 19200 or in some cases 9600 due to the speed of the UART. The 55 does behave slightly differently from the 50 because it gets a 1 character buffer due to the way the UART functions. In normal use this doesn't matter but I had to account for it in my CSD code. On transmit with an idle UART you can TLS, wait a couple of microseconds and then TLS again. The TSF flag clears almost immediately and you only have to wait when the second character goes into the board. I don't know if you get extra time to read the received character, but you probably do before an overrun error would occur.

There is also an M8652 which is listed as a double buffered async terminal control. Never seen one of these and I haven't looked at the manual for it. The M8653 provided the modem control signals for the M8652. The 8/a has a hex board the M8319 which is a quad serial UART based board. There was one of these in one of my 8/a machines. This is programmatically different and can't be used directly as a console.
 
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