thad@cup.portal.com (Thad P Floryan) (01/10/91)
koz@frog.UUCP (Koz Egersheim) in <22504@frog.UUCP> writes:
I have recently come up on an HP ThinkJet Printer. The d____ thing
has the HP-IB (surpossedly = GP-IB IEEEE-488) interface. This means
that it has a 24 (twenty-four, no mis-print) pin Centronics style
connector that needs to connect to my Amiga 1000 (I hope).
Has anyone done this? What is the pin-tp-pin scheme?
Will it work? What printer driver did you use?
The HP-IB (aka IEEE-488) bus requires an interface and protocol converter to
function on the Amiga; you will NOT be able to simply "map" the signal pinnings
to the Amiga's parallel port along the lines it appears you're thinking (thus
I haven't included the HP-IB pinouts).
ASDG does produce an IEEE-488 interface card for the Amiga, and maybe (by now)
some other 3rd party mfrs do, too.
You can probably find ASDG's address/phone# in some of the Amiga-related mags,
though I do recall seeing a recent post by Perry Kivolowitz (of ASDG) in
comp.sys.amiga.misc recently, so you may want to "grep" for "perry" to find
his email address.
Thad Floryan [ thad@cup.portal.com ]kent@swrinde.nde.swri.edu (Kent D. Polk) (01/12/91)
In article <jms.2248@vanth.UUCP> jms@vanth.UUCP (Jim Shaffer) writes: [...] >the bus has an address which is set by (usually) DIP switches. You would >need to locate a GPIB interface and driver software for your Amiga, and >then hope that it supports using a device as a printer. I can't say I've >ever heard of anyone other than HP producing GPIB printers and plotters, >and I have no idea why they did it. Again, there are no GPIB device drivers for the Amiga. The ASDG card uses a run-time library (really is a shared library, but the software can only effectively handle one process talking to it at a time). I believe the ACDA card uses a link library with source, but don't remember for sure. There have been other GPIB printer makers. Most were plug-in interface boards like the one Epson did for their FX series printers that HP sold. Even Commodore used the GPIB for their Pet computer interface. The Vic-20 and C64 'serial' interface was an adaptation of the GPIB. There are thousands of GPIB devices. Though most of them are instruments, you can get pen digitizers, picture digitizers, plotters, disk drives... In short, GPIB was the first really successful external bus which could really deal with multiple 'intelligent' devices, much less multiple bus controllers. HP put so many of their products on GPIB because, from a hardware perspective, you could truly plug & go, every HP tech computer had a GPIB (HPIB) interface, and you could truly handle multiple devices in a fairly high-speed, asynchronous environment, ... Phew. Nope, I don't work at HP. Also, I want to see most of this stuff moving over to SCSI when applicable - You see, I need this 12-channel 50MHz digitizer that transfers at hard disk speeds ... Kent Polk: Southwest Research Institute (512) 522-2882 Internet : kent@swrinde.nde.swri.edu UUCP : $ {cs.utexas.edu, gatech!petro, sun!texsun}!swrinde!kent
tony@sdd.hp.com (Tony Parkhurst) (01/16/91)
|> koz@frog.UUCP (Koz Egersheim) in <22504@frog.UUCP> writes: |> |> I have recently come up on an HP ThinkJet Printer. The d____ thing |> has the HP-IB (surpossedly = GP-IB IEEEE-488) interface. This means |> that it has a 24 (twenty-four, no mis-print) pin Centronics style |> connector that needs to connect to my Amiga 1000 (I hope). |> |> Has anyone done this? What is the pin-tp-pin scheme? |> Will it work? What printer driver did you use? I had this EXACT same situation a few years ago. What I ended up doing was designing an interface converter that required some TTL inverter chips and some resistors. It took me about an hour to design, build and test, and it worked the first time. The basic idea was that in order to avoid the protocal and addressing stuff for HP-IB, put the printer in the "Listen-Only" or "Listen-Always" mode, then the logic needs inversion, and the HP-IB is open-collector, so you need resistors. Since the A-1000 has +5 volts on the centronics connector, no need for another power supply. If you like, I can mail you a schematic, or, I may be able to dig up the one I used. (I even had one evaluated by Black-Box, but they apparently weren't interested (perhaps it was too low cost:-)). I didn't do much with graphics on the ThinkJet, so I used the generic driver -- Tony