Using putty as a terminal emulator I get a TUI, but those function keys do not work, interesting.

Chapter 3, Page 61 in the pdf is about the text user interface the command module provides, and yes, this thing has auto detection of your terminal type. And you can override it.

ST is a command that is recognized, and so is ST VT220. Resizing my konsole window appropriately and doing

% echo $TERM
xterm-256color
% export TERM=vt220
% picocom -b 9600 -d 8 -p n -f n -y n /dev/ttyUSB0

and then running

ST VT220

Gives me a text user interface with working navigation using the function keys.

Now it completely died :(
There's a buzzer on the control module board and not even that does a sound anymore

Letting it cool off a bit, it comes back but barely so.

The PSU makes a squeaking sound on power off now. Yeaaaah... guess it's getting ugly now

Letting it rest a bit stabilizes it. I know it's risky to even try with a sketchy PSU but I have an urge to poke this thing. Will come up with a temporary solution tomorrow.

The terminal emulation gave me issues. Only function keys F1 through F4 would work in the text interface. So I dug out a real terminal and set it to VT220 mode.

It still doesn't work right

Sneak peek at the next step: trying one of those multimeter modules. Looks like there are even more issues ahead

I want to move onto programming the instruments asap. The PSU issue of the main frame unit can wait. I got this VME back plane I used for tinkering with VME systems before

VXI stands for VME eXtension for Instrumentation. My command module and instruments only use the P1 connector which is also present in VME. So it should work

VXI modules have a physical switch to set their logical address. This is one of the HP E1326B multimeter modules.

I had to change the LADDR. It wasn't set to a multiple of 8.

It worked yesterday in the mainframe with the flaky PSU.

And now it does not. The command module notices that something's there

If I ask the command module what modules it sees it correctly reports that there is something there at addresses 0 and 16.
Probing address 16 (next line) does give me the correct result. Probing an address that doesn't exist (next line), the command module notices there is nothing. Bus issues? Some control line that's missing?

I have a feeling I'm missing something about the bus. ChatGPT keeps hallucinating about things on P2. Which I don't even physically have on my modules. Time to hit the specifications.

So let's give it a read on how all this works. Shall we?