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TI Silent 700 model 703, general questions

D

Divarin

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Mar 9, 2019
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565
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Cleveland, OH
Okay earlier I posted about a broken silent 700 model 703. I have since then received a refund.
I picked up another and it seems to be working okay I guess but I'm not sure how to get it connected.
My main PC is a linux box (Linux Mint) but I've only been using linux for a few months so I'm not expert with it.
I do have a USB serial adapter which I use to connect various things using tcpser and I have done some Googling and saw posts about "agetty" which I'm not familiar with.

First I tried taking a zimodem rs232-wifi adater, configuring it for 300 baud, (saving that setting) and then connecting it to the silent 700. no good.
Then I tried tcpser on my PC set at 300 baud, no good.
I think the issue is that the silent 700 doesn't support no parity so I think I have to use agetty but I'm not sure how.
I did find this reddit post which shows a configuration for the model 703. so I put that into /etc/termcap. This file did not exist before doing this so I'm not sure this is the right file, I understand different distros use different files in different locations sometimes.
Anyway so then I tried launching agetty with:
agetty 300 /dev/ttyUSB0 ti703
and it just sits there for about 5 seconds and then drops back to the shell prompt.

the "Line Ready (LINE RDY)" light never illuminates.
 
Last edited:
Divarin said:
Hmm okay that gives me something to go off of. I did notice in the manual that if the "Data Set Ready" signal is missing then it won't attempt to communicate.
Click to expand...

Ya, and since my Altair-Duino used a USB-to-RS-232 cable, those signals weren't there (or weren't right). So what I did was loop them back on the TI side. So when the TI set DTR, it would see DSR come on and the same for RTS/CTS.
Even though mine has the "high speed option", that's still 1200 BPS, so I wasn't worried too much about hardware flow control on the Altair-duino side.

But you can still send data too fast to the TI. But it's rare that I see that problem.
 
Okay so if the USB to RS-232 cable is the culprit in my case I wonder why my zimodem adapter also didn't work. but maybe it also doesn't set the DSR signal, or doesn't do it correctly. I guess I don't know enough about the rs232 standard but it would seem to me that signal would need to be there for other devices to work as well and this zimodem & usb adapter both work fine otherwise on other devices but maybe those other devices aren't paying attention to that signal.

I'll try to make a cable similar to the one you made and see if that gets it going.
 
DSR/DTR were pretty much unused in MS-DOS land - at least from my memory.

RTS/CTS only work with devices that support hardware flow control. I know that my Wifi modems came with hardware flow control disabled by default - but you could enable it.
 
Okay I made a wire similar to yours, Rlauzon, except I did it sloppy because all I had was a bag full of 25 pin gender changers and some dupont connectors so I did it without soldering just pushing dupont cables onto the pins of the 25 pin connectors.
The Line Rdy light came on but I'm still not able to make a connection, or if I am connected it's not obvious.
Then I tried connecting it to my zimodem just for the heck of it even though the data bits/ partity is not consistent and seemed to work!
Except now I see some of the keys on the board don't work. good thing I have that other one that broke in shipping, I'll try swapping keyboards.
Still, I'd like to be able to connect to my PC using tcpser or agetty or something
 
well it looks like I still have my work cut out for me.
I was enjoying some BBSing on the thing yesterday after getting it going, had it running for a few hours, off and on.
Today when to power it up again and all I got was a slight flash of the leds.
I tried swapping over to the power supply from the broken unit, same.
Then I tried powering up the broken unit and it powers up just fine with both power supplies.
Somehow, between these two units I need to make one working Silent 700.
 
The Silent 700 series were meant to be portable teletypes. So I think it's safe to assume that they were banged around a great deal.
 
rlauzon said:
The Silent 700 series were meant to be portable teletypes. So I think it's safe to assume that they were banged around a great deal.
Click to expand...

Yeah probably. I'm going to assume it might be capacitor related but I don't want to just go recapping willy-nilly :) I'd prefer to prove that first. But for now I was able to get the first one going by swapping the mechanical component out. Kind of surprised that the whole printer assembly is all one unit fairly easily extracted and swapped out without having to deal with tiny fiddly bits.
 
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