FSl164A hp-il/RS232 Interface Power Supply

[Andy Delano]

I am trying to determine the voltage/polarity for the FSl164A's DC power supply. The FSl164A was produced by Firmware Specialists and is very similar to the HP82164a.

Thanks,
Andy

[Garth Wilson]

9VDC, center positive.

The FSI164A was almost 100% instruction-compatible with the HP unit, but came with two RS-232 channels standard, and optionally up to 8, had deeper buffers, and also had a battery power option. I do believe FSI had told me there was a bug with even parity, but I never used the parity.

[Andy Delano]

Thanks! Does yours have the battery option? Mine does not but I was thinking it might be something I could add.

Edited: 18 Oct 2009, 4:52 p.m.

[Garth Wilson]

I don't have the battery option, but since it has a DC input, it would be easy to have an external battery pack plugged in.

I think this was one of three different things with EPROMs in it that I refreshed recently and kept hex files on, since EPROMs don't hold their data indefinitely. I wanted to just read the EPROM into the programmer and then program it back before some of the contents were gone for good. I believe I also did it for my HP92198 80-column video interface and my 82169A HPIL-to-HPIB interface converter. I'd like to do it for the BIOS ROMS for my DOS PC too, but that's the PC the EPROM programmer works on.

[Klaus]

Hi Garth,
you can hot-plug the BIOS-EPROMS, remove them after the PC has booted, and reprogram them.

[Marcus von Cube, Germany]

Why not just read them (from DOS) in the PC and create a new set without risking a dead system?