PDP-10 Blinkenlights at the top of the racks

[John Peterson]

The KI10 (according to the processor maintenance manual, p.12 & 165) had an additional three panels of blinkenlights, one at the top of each of the three racks. Unfortunately the scan on Bitsavers is too murky to discern much detail. Does anybody have a clearer photo/diagram of them?

I found one photo on the old LCM page, but it only provides detail for 1/3 of the panel.

Thanks

[dab]

Here are pictures I took at LCM.

http://pdp10.froghouse.org/KI10/

[Richard C]

The KA10 also has additional panels, these were used mostly for maintenance. Implementing these would require a more detailed simulation than SimH provides.

Rich

[Lars Brinkhoff]

Now, this is the kind of Bay Watch I enjoy!

[John Peterson]

Some additional indicator layouts (e.g., for the primary registers) are shown here: http://pdp10.froghouse.org/

Not sure if these could be hooked up to SimH or not.

[Richard C]

Some sort of, however they would not have much meaning under SimH. Also only with PDP10-Kx, the PDP10 and KLH10 are not based on hardware like PDP10-Kx is.

Rich

[dab]

The APR indicator panel shown on http://pdp10.froghouse.org is *very* specific to the micro-architecture of my KV10 FPGA design.  Not to say it couldn't be driven from SimH, just that it wouldn't make much sense to do so.

[Richard C]

I think all the lights shown there are available on PDP10-KA. I had to add some code in to track hardware interrupt levels. All lights on the PiDP10 front panel function correctly for a KA10. These might not be correct for a KL10 or KS10.

[oscarv]

I'm not sure those additional indicator panels will ever be replicated (or whether you would ever need to look at them in daily use). But I did add a daisy-chained expansion connector to the PiDP-10 so that at least technically, they could be added. Just one MCP23017 I2C chip for each panel plus some power lines would do the job, I think.

I'd personally be more interested in adding a Magic Switch. But I still have not found a way to reliably sense a switch with only one wire attached to it so that toggling it makes the system crash! If anyone knows of a small circuit to do this, I did keep a GPIO pin reserved for the purpose :-).

A Maintenance Panel would also be nice. It's currently done in software.

Kind regards,

Oscar.

[Heinz-Bernd Eggenstein]

More Blinkenlights are never bad :-). I just finished a modifikation of my IKEA OBEGRÄNSAD 16x16 LED matrix lamp, now driven by a Raspi Pico W and acting as a wall clock, but I'd love to also add a mode where it displays some data from (say) the PiDP-10 once it is ready. As the 256 LED pixels are set via SPI (with a clock rate of 10 MHz and higher), you get a crazy high "frame rate" that allows to create grey scale effects, so things like the "incandescent lamp" simulation used in the most popular PiDP-8 code are probably possible.  This was inspired by the code in https://github.com/ph1p/ikea-led-obegraensad

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FxJbL1KBsusW2GsBUBQIrR--gDTBF7g2/view

[Andy]

you literally cannot have enough blinkenlights - that is a fun project!

[Tim Radde]

I will never tire of blinken lights.  :)

[DR]

Many years ago when I was in college at UofWis, Madison, I got a job
working as an operator on the mainframe floor.  We had a Burroughs B5500
which wasn't too much fun to watch but at one time had two Univac 1108s
humming away on the mainframe floor.  The engineering panel had many
banks of lights, all neon so they would go on and off quickly vs.
incandescent which would just glow. LEDs were just being produced and
not in the panels yet.


It was great to watch the big display as it ran, sometimes we'd start 8
or so jobs just to watch the address bus and I/O channels get more active.


Indeed, one can never have too many blinking lights. And thank goodness
that Oscar has provided us with reproductions using LEDs which can
flicker rather than just glow.

[rwh...@picrad.com]

If that machine had just been a Burroughs 205 (aka "The Batcomputer"), you would've had plenty of blinkenlights.

[Anthony Eros]

I was kinda hoping that Oscar might announce the availability of the PiDP-10 kit on DEC-10-Day.😀

It would make a great Christmas gift!

— Tony

[Andy]

it really is all i want for christmas

[Andy]

that and world peace of course :-)

[Heinz-Bernd Eggenstein]

More blinkenlights for add-ons: I just got a "FREKVENS" 16 x 16 LED matrix light thingy from IKEA, which is smaller and much less expensive than the "Obegränsad"  light https://hackaday.com/2023/05/25/hacking-the-ikea-obegransad-led-wall-lamp/ which I discussed earlier . If you rip the FREKVENS apart (just screws, no glue or rivets this time) you'll get a 16x16 VERY bright LED panel which is easily hackable because all the pixels, again, can be shifted into the display registers via SPI and then latched all at once to the LEDs, so it's a nice building block for your own DIY blinkenlights playground. All the signal lines are nicely marked on the silk screen.  E.g. see https://blog.adafruit.com/2020/04/07/hacking-the-ikea-frekvens-led-panel-with-a-microcontroller-feather-arduino-ikea/

HB