My kit is up and running

[phe]

Tonight it is finally there!! After several debugging session with Grant, and a round trip airplane ride for my boards to Alaska and back, I finally have the system running.

How cool it is to do all the same work now some 30 years later, like so many did back inthe 70s, and then finally get it working. I even picked up a cheap small AM radio at the thrift store. "I can hear music... sweet sweet music"

Some of the details:

I have kit 5, with a case signature says kit 6.

I had it all together but could not get things to work. After spending a couple of hours on the phone, Grant graciously offered to test my cards out. I mailed them to him and he found a couple of problems with the memory board. One of the 7404 ICs was bad, and I messed up one of the sockets. After soldering the socket in, I realized one of the pins had bent instead of coming through the hole in the board. When I removed the socket, I pulled out a via or at least cracked a connection. Grant fixed that up for me and replaced the bad 7404.

When I got the boards back, I could not get the protect light to go out and I could not load anything into RAM. Again, back on the phone with Grant and we temporarily disabled the protect signal. Now I can deposit values as I like. I cannot protect my memory at the moment, but that is ok.

I've got a new meter arriving on Thursday. When it gets here, I will try to figure out what is wrong with the protect circuit.