Well the special day has come and while I don’t have everything that I need to create automated test harnesses. I have the brain; the magical item I’ve hinted at a few times that I’d hopefully be able to buy in December. Well, I called my contact and he said the employee who thought he knew how to use it (but didn’t…so the business thinks it was as waste of money) doesn’t work there anymore…no one there understands how to use it (too complicated for them, I guess) so they are ready to sell now.
I reconnected with my contact, drove 400 miles round-trip today to the location and purchased…a HUNTRON TRACKER 3200S.
https://huntron.com/products/tracker3200s.htm (Images attached are from the product website, copyrights belong to Huntron.com)
That’s right…I’ll give you a moment to let that sink in.
OK in all seriousness, this item is like a logical X-Ray machine for electronics, it’s “the” black box PCB fault finding instrument. With this I can finally troubleshoot my Tezro 1.8v failure and troubleshoot the stack of PSUs to rebuild I’ve been collecting. Now, I don’t have rights to the PC software to perform automated PCB board scans and recall/compares right now. But I hope to have that figured out a couple months from now ($$$). For now the main unit works fine and I can use it manually.
While I need to refocus on actual work efforts in the short term. I’m hopeful in a month or two to be able to start cranking through my SGI troubleshooting backlog and when that dam breaks, rebuilt stuff will start to pop-up for sale here on IrixNet!
There is a hope that if this all starts, I’ll start using it for repair services in the future for SGI board repairs. The tracker works best if you have a working example PCB to compare the bad PCB to, so one-offs will be more scan and guess.
NEED -> 