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Tandy 1100FD, a few questions

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keenerb

Veteran Member
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Mar 11, 2016
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Georgia, USA
MDUSrdsm.jpg


Physically, it's in pretty good shape. Floppy doesn't work, but I understand that's pretty common with these, and I've ordered a replacement belt.

My biggest problem is that the battery is no good. It's a sealed lead acid 6v 1.8ah battery, and I can't identify any appropriate replacement anywhere.

wbrVsycl.jpg


Also, has anyone managed a Gotek installation into one of these? It looks like the floppy connector is proprietary but carries standard floppy signals. I'm considering hiding the gotek inside the system and routing a USB extender cable and switches out through the expansion plate cover at the rear of the machine. Looks like there's plenty of room inside.

2jysewbl.jpg



Should I be worried about that yellow rechargeable battery?
 
twistedpneumatic said:
I think this battery will suit just fine: http://www.batteryspace.com/SLA-Battery-Sealed-Lead-Acid-Battery-6V-1.2AH-S.aspx
Battery life will be only 66% of its original 3.5hrs, so figure 2.2hrs. If that doesn't work, cut the connector and make a battery pack out of AA batteries.

CMOS battery looks good, wouldn't touch it.
Click to expand...

The Tandy battery is 98mm x 42mm x 25mm, rougly measured. It's quite small. That battery looks too big, I'm afraid.

I'm planning on making a battery pack out of AA batteries, I'll just need to include a diode or somethign to keep the laptop from exploding...
 
keenerb said:
The Tandy battery is 98mm x 42mm x 25mm, rougly measured. It's quite small. That battery looks too big, I'm afraid.

I'm planning on making a battery pack out of AA batteries, I'll just need to include a diode or somethign to keep the laptop from exploding...
Click to expand...

I have an original tandy rechargeable battery pack for Tandy 1100 FD / 1100 HD Output 6v 1.8Ah - if you are interested in purchasing it. It is unused and in the original box.
 
Jimmys said:
I have an original tandy rechargeable battery pack for Tandy 1100 FD / 1100 HD Output 6v 1.8Ah - if you are interested in purchasing it. It is unused and in the original box.
Click to expand...

I am quite interested actually. It's probably no good after all this time anyway, but how much would you want for it?
 
Due note that SLA batteries have a 4 year shelf life. This applies to ALL SLA batteries, be that a car, lawnmower, UPS, etc. battery. Make sure to check the voltage to confirm it isn't a dud.
 
I replaced my CMOS batteries when I had mine apart to address the floppy issue. I installed a battery holder in the board, so that I can replace the battery at any time in the future, just by opening up that access cover.
 
keenerb said:
Also, has anyone managed a Gotek installation into one of these? It looks like the floppy connector is proprietary but carries standard floppy signals. I'm considering hiding the gotek inside the system and routing a USB extender cable and switches out through the expansion plate cover at the rear of the machine. Looks like there's plenty of room inside.
Click to expand...

I have it on my project list to do that. Note that you can get a Gotek-like drive that looks like it has the same floppy connector as the 1100 FD, but it doesn't.

keenerb said:
Should I be worried about that yellow rechargeable battery?
Click to expand...

Only if it's bulging/leaking.
 
I've gotten a 6v power supply together to replace the on-board battery, but the Tandy gets stuck in a reboot loop using it.

The back leg of the power connector appears to be positive, the leg closest to keyboard appears to be negative. When I supply 6v power over the battery connector, it runs the bios test successfully, begins to boot, and then reboots at the point it would normally seek on the floppy drive. It seems to me that it could be insufficient amperage, but I'm using a 2500mah 6v power supply which exceeds the 1800mah 6v battery by a handy amount.

I've also tried with 4 AA batteries, same problem.
 
keenerb said:
Physically, it's in pretty good shape. Floppy doesn't work, but I understand that's pretty common with these, and I've ordered a replacement belt.
Click to expand...

You need to do a little more than just replace the belt. The old belt usually melted to the pulleys in the floppy drive, so you'll need to clean the residue off before installing the new belt.

If you don't, the old belt residue will cause timing issues and the floppy drive won't work correctly.

keenerb said:
Also, has anyone managed a Gotek installation into one of these? It looks like the floppy connector is proprietary but carries standard floppy signals. I'm considering hiding the gotek inside the system and routing a USB extender cable and switches out through the expansion plate cover at the rear of the machine. Looks like there's plenty of room inside.
Click to expand...

Yes. I picked up this 34-24 adaptor which just let me plug everything together. Worked like a charm with a standard Gotek with FlashFloppy.

But I had to mod the case a bit and remove the metal shielding just to the right of the yellow CMOS battery in your picture. The Gotek drive doesn't have its plus in the same place as the proprietary Tandy drive.
 
I was able to get the yellow battery replaced with a vertical CR2032 battery holder by extending one of the pins. It keeps time now.

rlauzon said:
You need to do a little more than just replace the belt. The old belt usually melted to the pulleys in the floppy drive, so you'll need to clean the residue off before installing the new belt.
If you don't, the old belt residue will cause timing issues and the floppy drive won't work correctly.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the tip. I just got mine recently, and the belt was indeed disintegrated. I tried swapping it with a rubber band as a stopgap solution til I can track down a replacement, but now having read this, I noticed the residue on the pulleys as you describe. Gonna try cleaning that off when I get back from work today and see if it reads properly. This laptop is kinda useless without a working floppy drive. :(
 
Yeah, you kinda need to stand on your head to get this machine apart.

I was able to get the floppy to read the directory using a rubber band in lieu of a proper belt, but it doesn't have enough traction for proper timing, so can't do much more than that. But at least the heads and electronics seem to work. So I've got a replacement floppy belt on order, and it wouldn't be a bad idea to figure out a replacement for the 6v sealed Lead-Acid battery pack at some point (though that's not a priority right now).

Anybody happen across a technical manual for this thing? I'd like to build a CF card solution for it, but I have no idea what the pinouts on either of the internal expansion headers are.

I've a suspicion that the 50-pin HDD interface may be XTIDE (not to be confused with XUB), rather than AT-IDE, and thus incompatible with CF cards. But it was designed in '89, so who knows. Even if it were AT-IDE, it'd likely have a rather low limit on drive geometry, so only small CF cards would be usable.
 
Blackepyon, this seems as good a thread as any for our previous discussion, I hope it helps others. I took pics of the three HDs that I had from my 6 1110HD laptops, they are all Connor CP-2024 with the same firmware revision. Quick look at the datasheet says it should be normal IDE and hopefully the specs are reproducible on CF cards. If someone cooks up an adapter I will buy a few, these things have a hot following on eBay and are more sought after than the 1000HX so I bet there would be a market.

hdd.jpg

hdd1.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsP5QYOcuSs

https://stason.org/TULARC/pc/hard-drives-hdd/conner/CP-2024AT-21MB-2-5-SSL-IDE-AT.html

C P - 2 0 2 4 A T CONNER
NO MORE PRODUCED Native| Translation
------+-----+-----+-----
Form 2.5"/SUPERSLIMLINE Cylinders 654| 615| |
Capacity form/unform 21/ MB Heads 2| 4| |
Seek time / track 23.0/ 5.0 ms Sector/track 33| 17| |
Controller IDE / AT Precompensation
Cache/Buffer 8 KB LOOK-AHEAD Landing Zone
Data transfer rate 1.250 MB/S int Bytes/Sector 512
3.750 MB/S ext
Recording method RLL 2/7 operating | non-operating
-------------+--------------
Supply voltage 5 V Temperature *C 5 55 | -40 60
Power: sleep 0.3 W Humidity % 8 80 | 8 80
standby 0.5 W Altitude km -0.061 3.050| 12.200
idle 1.5 W Shock g 10 | 100
seek 3.0 W Rotation RPM 3433
read/write 3.0 W Acoustic dBA 34
spin-up W ECC Bit 64
MTBF h 100000
Warranty Month
Lift/Lock/Park YES Certificates CSA,IEC435,UL478,VDE
 
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RetroGaming Roundup said:
Blackepyon, this seems as good a thread as any for our previous discussion, I hope it helps others. I took pics of the three HDs that I had from my 6 1110HD laptops, they are all Connor CP-2024 with the same firmware revision. Quick look at the datasheet says it should be normal IDE and hopefully the specs are reproducible on CF cards. If someone cooks up an adapter I will buy a few, these things have a hot following on eBay and are more sought after than the 1000HX so I bet there would be a market.
Click to expand...

Does the 1100HD have a 44-pin 2-row header on the motherboard? Because if so it should be as simple as hooking up a laptop IDE-CF adapter (I've got one kicking around somewhere...). But when I took apart my 1100FD, I saw a 50-pin header. Was there an intermediate adapter between the motherboard and the 44-pin ribbon?
IMG_20190720_180723415.jpgIMG_20190720_180808109.jpg
So long as it's AT-IDE, as your hard drives from the 1100HD suggest mine might be, then all I need is a pinout for the header and I should be able to spin up a board for it.


And then there's the black flex-ribbon header by the rear expansion port that I assume is for a modem (this is a business model after all).
IMG_20190720_180939789.jpg
 
That expansion port is for the modem.

When I get home tonight I will count the pins on the header and cable, there is no intermediate board and that ribbon cable from the HDD plugs into the board and there is no separate power cable.
 
@ keenerb, I have several spares if your floppy turns out to be toast. I would love to see a gotek adaptation for this PC as well, maybe DJOS can cook one up if we give him what he needs?

So, the cable and header on the 1110HD are 44 pin. I ordered a 44 pin IDE to CF, $4 so who cares, I would rather have it on hand in case a CF works. I am glad this came up because when my original HDD failed I kind of shelved it and this was a favorite PC of mine so I would love it get it running with a CF card again. Back in the day I even ran Stacker to get about double space on the HDD and had a Backpack 1.44mb floppy and all of it worked so very well. This was my BBS and even gaming machine when I was in the gulf war. I have to admit I do not know a tremendous amount about the details of CF replacing HDDs, I know they are IDE standard and I have used the suggested ones in Amigas/486/Pentium/etc. computers and they just configure and work like magic. Is this laptop looking for this one HDD or can it play well with a CF card and if so what size and type? Once I have the adapter I can try what CF cards I have on hand and see what it plays well with, maybe order a few smaller ones if needed.


hdd2.jpg

The modem

hdd3.jpg
 
RetroGaming Roundup said:
@ keenerb, I have several spares if your floppy turns out to be toast. I would love to see a gotek adaptation for this PC as well, maybe DJOS can cook one up if we give him what he needs?

So, the cable and header on the 1110HD are 44 pin. I ordered a 44 pin IDE to CF, $4 so who cares, I would rather have it on hand in case a CF works. I am glad this came up because when my original HDD failed I kind of shelved it and this was a favorite PC of mine so I would love it get it running with a CF card again. Back in the day I even ran Stacker to get about double space on the HDD and had a Backpack 1.44mb floppy and all of it worked so very well. This was my BBS and even gaming machine when I was in the gulf war. I have to admit I do not know a tremendous amount about the details of CF replacing HDDs, I know they are IDE standard and I have used the suggested ones in Amigas/486/Pentium/etc. computers and they just configure and work like magic. Is this laptop looking for this one HDD or can it play well with a CF card and if so what size and type? Once I have the adapter I can try what CF cards I have on hand and see what it plays well with, maybe order a few smaller ones if needed.


View attachment 54744

The modem

View attachment 54745
Click to expand...

Well, your motherboard looks completely different from mine on the lower end there. You've got the 44-pin header (that's standard laptop IDE) on the motherboard, but I've got that goofy 50-pin header. Maybe the 1100FD COULD take a HDD option, but used a different adapter or something, who knows.

I might try to probe it out at some point and see where the traces go. I'm hoping it's just a wonky ISA bus. 62 pin ISA can be reduced down to 50 pins if you remove what you don't strictly need, such as the IRQ pins, etc. Mostly, it's the address/data pins, power, reset, and the mem r/w that you need, and if that's the case I could probably whip up a version of Lo-Tech's ISA-CF card for it, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
 
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