In the last post I upgraded the software of my logic analyzer, this time I’m upgrading the hardware. One of the options that could have come on the 1660c/cs series was option 015, which adds a LAN interface. Through the lan interface you can access all the files on the machine as well as use X11 for window sharing. This option seems pretty rare, at least to me. I looked on ebay and did not see any listed with it (although when people wrap the cables up the back it conveniently covers up where the port would be). If you google the option upgrade kit, “E2472A”, you find nothing other than one guy on the EEVBlog forum who seems to have found one succesfully. Googling the actual part number, 01660-66516-a, gets 1 more hit for someone searching for one and a few hits for part surplus places which are either out of stock or auto generated and useless. Clearly if I wanted to get one, I would have to make it myself.

Luckily there exist three (3) images of the board in question. One of them is a stock image while the other two useful ones come from this forum post, which for some reason doesn’t come up if you search for it… but I found it somehow anyway. There is some good information there including a link to this site… which doesn’t work. Regardless, I now had some information on what the board is and how to install it, namely that I needed a RAM upgrade as well.

To start, I took the machine apart and probed it with my multimeter for a few days until I was left with this: 01660-65514-a.pdf. I went a lot further than necessary, mostly because I might want to make a 68k machine one day, but I found what I needed pretty quickly. In true test equipment fashion, the LAN controller and circuitry is built into the main board and the only difference is the IO board and RAM upgrade. I traced out the IO board connector to the controller with the help of the datasheet and with the help of the 2 pictures in that thread, I figured out the schematic of the new board: 01660-66516x-a.pdf. There was one pin that was not part of the keyboard, lan, or mouse busses, that seemed to be addressed independently. I assumed that this was some sort of sense pin to see which IO board was installed.

On my IO board, 01660-66515-a, the sense pin is not connected to anything. Here I had to guess, but I figured these things are usually active low so I stuck in a jumper wire to ground and tried it out: 01660-66514-a.pdf 01660-66514-a.pdf 01660-66514-a.pdf

It does let me install it but it complains that some options were not able to be installed, also I installed version 1.01 because thats what came with the machine which I don’t think it liked. I do have later versions that I’ll use later. The operating system comes with both the LAN and non-LAN versions on the same disk so you don’t have to worry about that.

So now that I know what to do, all I have to do is do it. Unfortunately, I figured this out the week before I leave school for 2 months so I will not be able to test it until then. I hope that this was still interesting and of use to anyone else with a 1660c/cs series analyzer who wants LAN. All my work is on my gitlab