 Okay, so I've opened up the device and it's it was quite dirty inside some sort of a just sort of black dust I don't know what it was and the reason that I did take the front off is so that I could take the low tape arm off of this which goes right in that hole so I've taken it out here it is and the only thing that was really holding it on it's not bent or anything so the only thing that was holding it on was this screw which is a bit of a problem because when you tighten this down that sort of implies that this arm should rotate on this axle but it it doesn't so I'm thinking that maybe what I should do is just remove the lock washer from the top and see if I can take this axle out and see if you know maybe it's just like dirty or greasy or you know dried up oil or something like that and you know maybe put some oil on it and see if that helps because one thing that certainly would not help is tightening this screw up because that will just not let this thing rotate at all so and I was calling these lock washers of course they're not lock washers they are circlips I think so they fit in this groove right over here and I can definitely see that there is some white junk build up in here it does feel a little sticky so I kind of think that I am going to clean this out and clean this and maybe replace it with some sewing machine oil and we'll see if that allows this thing to swivel nicely okay just a drop or two that was probably a little too much but that's okay now uh-huh yep that swivels quite nicely okay that's the way it's supposed to work and that explains why there is a clip here so that you can put the tape in and then sit it down on the tape and then as the tape runs out this goes lower and lower and lower until it hits the switch so I removed this thing from here which was holding this down so that can be removed and apparently the only thing that is now holding this are these two screws here also what I wanted to show was in here right here see I can push these and that's what the solenoid will do and if we look on the other side so that's how that works it's just a simple linkage that pushes these things forward and there's a spring on the back where my hand is that pulls it back off of it this it was sitting on these rubber bushings so apparently this is for a vibration so I was on bitsavers.org because their files are a little bit more organized than on the internet archive and I found this manual which actually is very virtually a match for the thing that I have again this is a tape reader perforator combination but the model number here is r a something 612x x being some number and mine is an rps 6122 so this is an extremely close match and what we have are the signals over here which correspond to the signals that come out of this logic board so now I have all the signals in addition this is also very interesting we see down here that there are actually two modes mode five and mode six and that really only says whether the data track outputs for the reader are inverted or not and there is a similar one for the input here's the block diagram and the interesting thing is it says right down here perforator logic card 111821 which is exactly the number that I found on the logic card so that works out perfectly and this is 111831 which is this other card which is the perforator driver card so a perfect match and here we have some information on the power supply so we can see that based on our previous measurements the plus and minus 12 volts were fine 34 volts plus or minus 2 volts which is just about what I got except for the 28 plus or minus 3 volts and I think I was getting also about 34 or 35 volts so this is out of spec unfortunately there are no adjustments maybe that means that one of the circuit elements is bad here we also see that the five volt rail should be 5.2 plus or minus 50 millivolts that also was out of spec it was 5.8 but there is a resistor there is an adjustment so I can definitely adjust the voltage on that we also have the full circuit diagram for the logic card and what I was talking about for active high and active low is let's see here's the input right along here these are the data inputs and we can see that they go through these XORs and the other legs of the XOR are connected to this jumper and this jumper determines whether the signals here are going to be inverted or not and that tells us whether these signals are active high or active low so I should probably search for that jumper to see you know whether it's enabled or not and I've removed the logic boards because I'm going to be adjusting their voltage supply so it would be kind of dangerous to keep them in there and I've pulled out the power supply a little bit to allow the light to shine into the the recess so that I can see exactly what I'm connecting to here is the plus 5 volt lamp test point it is not populated so I obviously don't have that and there's another plus 5 volt lamp over here and another motor supply which I don't have presumably that would go to the reader so I'm going to go ahead and adjust this potentiometer alright adjusting the voltage down to 5 point good enough so according to the manual you should just be able to press the feed button and this thing should just you know start pulling tape but I'm pressing the feed button and nothing is happening so why is that so according to the manual you should again just be able to put the switch in feed and the tape should advance but it also says that the punch command line must be held in the false state now if we look at the punch command input that's here it says it must be held in the false state which I believe means the inactive position condition now there are two modes like I said before mode five and mode six and the way that you set the mode is through this input over here the punch input mode select which selects mode five or six and according to this a mode five level is going to be open circuit now if we look at the punch command input we can see that open circuit is active so what we need to do is tie this input to ground in order to make sure that punch command is inactive then we should be able to run the feed so let's do that by putting a jumper into that 25 pin connector and seeing what happens alright so I have this fun little DB 25 breakout thing with screw terminals so I've just put a jumper between the punch command number 11 and one of the grounds this one is 25 so I'm just going to plug that into the back just like that and apparently I cannot and that's okay because I've got an enormous cable that I have plugged into the back and plugged into my jumper connector all right let's turn this thing on right and let's press feed I don't think anything's happening well maybe there are some other things that are wrong it basically says that the input line is disabled under the following conditions punch ready output is inactive or tape error output is active here is the punch ready output that's pin 12 so that should be inactive act that should be active right and also tape error output there is the tape error output on 20 which is only applicable for some things it indicates that the tape from the supply is loose broken or tight and that's interesting because maybe that has something to do with this lever but it needs to be like over here somewhere and in addition this is the tape error output which is showing high so that's the tape error output and now if I move the switch or if I move the arm okay well now I'm getting no tape error and so that would be the tension arm in this position and as you continue moving the tension arm this is the motor and as we draw more tape this tension arm will be pulled and then the motor will run which will let us have more tape which will lower the tension arm again and stop the motor and as long as this tension arm is between here and all the way up to about up to about here we won't get a tape error and if the tension is drawn too much we get another tape error and the motor stops so this as far as I can tell seems to be working so now what I can do is press tape feed again while holding this in the good position so I need to get a wire and you know hooky something up okay so I've hooky'd something up so that the switch is now in the correct position and here is the sprocket motor which is supposed to feed this fake tape that I made and I'm going to press feed and see what happens whoa wow I actually got tape to be punched and you can see that those are the sprocket holes so I've put the wheel back and I've noticed another problem is that when I move the tension arm to start the motor up well the motor spins but the wheel does not and the axle definitely spins so a fault has developed here I guess the round bushing is not securely attached to the axle anymore so this is the part to be replaced it goes right on here and it seems to have been attached to the axle using nothing but perhaps glue and we can take this apart and also if you look at the part list you maybe recognize what this is it's a grommet they're used to go into round holes in sheet metal to protect cables that go through them there's one and there's a second one that fits inside it we can see that this is the central part that goes over the axis it appears to be just a piece of plastic of some kind so I am going to go to the hardware store and let's see this grommet actually seems to be still pretty round it's got a few cracks in it so maybe this is okay but I'll try to replace it anyway this one's got a flat spot where it was sitting on the platter for a very very long time so I'm definitely going to try to replace this one so I'll see if I can find some grommets this is probably good to go I will need to attach it to the axle somehow and I'll probably use JB weld because it pretty much sticks anything to anything so let's see what I can find well I got the three sizes they had these seem to be the closest match this is the spacer so let's take this out and see how well they fit okay that doesn't seem too bad let's give it a test run okay that seems to fit pretty well and now all I need to do is glue it in place because otherwise it just comes right off so there's the wheel put back in and it's been curing for about half an hour or so and as you can see it's rotating the shaft which before it didn't do because the glue wasn't cured or the epoxy wasn't cured and this is the epoxy that I used JB weld it was clear weld now the the platter can go back on but this axle needs to be lubricated I'm touching the axle and there is some sort of a sticky residue on it so I'm just going to clean that off and put some more grease on it now to grease the platter I use this marine grease it's it's actually a blue color and I just put a few little dabs on the axle and it seems to be turning quite nicely now I don't know if marine grease is the right thing to do I'm not a mechanic so I have absolutely no idea what grease is appropriate for what there is grease that goes into here and this grease was black so I'm pretty sure that it's not going to be the marine grease because the marine grease is blue and I guess the color is significant I guess when I went to the store I also saw red tacky grease that definitely seemed like the wrong thing to use so I'm probably just going to use some general purpose grease which should just be you know ordinary black grease and now I'm just going to check to see that the motor is driving the platter properly yep everything looks pretty good stops starts again okay well the next thing to do is to test that I can actually activate the solenoids to punch some data so I've taken the DB 25 cable and run it all the way over to a raspberry pi and this breakout board and I've written a simple raspberry pi program in Python which basically just manipulates the GPIOs and you know does the signals in the proper way okay so I am going to punch a bite with a single bit on it and see what happens so here we go all right that did seem to actually punch something let me punch each bit one after the other and then we'll see what the pattern we get is so two four eight one zero two zero four zero eight zero and just for fun FF and that should be all of the bets all right and let's take a look and see what we got I will go ahead and press the feed button oh the feed button isn't working oh yes that's because my program is not properly dropping the line so here let me turn this off great just pull this all right so what we can see is that I've got I've double punched it apparently that's quite interesting right so I think the only thing wrong was actually with my program in that at the very end I called GPIO cleanup which releases all the lines and apparently that sets the lines to basically a random state or a semi-random state so I've removed the GPIO cleanup line and let's now take a look and see if I get all the bits so we'll punch a zero one two four eight one zero two zero four zero eight zero and FF and zero zero and FF zero zero of course shouldn't do anything except punch a sprocket hole so I'll turn this off now and move the tape here we go we're still not quite getting things this was the area that I punched before I'm not really sure what's going on oh okay I see what's what's happening it looks like I over punched the area that I previously punched but there is the zero one zero two zero four zero eight and that would be the one zero and then of course one of these is the two zero one of these is the four zero there is the eight zero this is the FF zero and FF so I do have a working punch now the interesting thing is how fast it goes it is supposed to go 120 characters per second maybe or 75 characters per second maybe I'm not quite sure okay let's try again I'm going to print nine characters this time at a slower rate and this time I'm printing them at point three seconds so 300 milliseconds or about three characters per second okay so that seems to have worked so now let's see if I go a little faster let's go ten times as fast all right that also seems to have worked so that was 33 characters per second let's try to double that and the reason why I'm saying try is that I'm using Python's time.sleep this is not a real-time operating system so yeah there is no sure bet here so this is going at 15 milliseconds per character is about 67 characters per second okay that actually seems to have worked so let's do nine milliseconds per character which is 111 characters per second all right so let's remove the paper and see what we got and we did get a good pattern on all of the tests so I would say that this could probably go right up to 120 characters per second so that's that the only thing remaining is to load a tape and loading a tape would mean testing that the platter is going to move properly and feed tape into the mechanism which means that I'm going to have to print a lot more bytes so let's see how that works okay so I have wound the tape around in the specified manner okay and it's just going to come out I'm not spooling it or anything and I've placed this arm in roughly the middle position to give it a little bit of tape before the tape actually feeds and I've written a program to output all 256 characters so the first thing I'm going to do is turn it on and maybe feed the tape a little bit to make sure that we are pulling the tape properly so here we go feeding great and the platter did seem to spin properly and give the tape a little less tension and this part is where we're not actually punching anything out but this part over here is where we're punching the index holes or you know sprocket holes or whatever they are so let me go ahead and run the program okay that was 256 characters of data and that was a lot of chat it was kind of confetti and it looks like everything is actually punched properly so I think probably the next video is going to be about getting the tape reader reading and then I could actually read this tape this test tape now and see if I can read all the characters so until then I hope you enjoyed this fixing a thing video and I will see you next time bye bye Rob tries to fix a thing