The SCELBI cassette and oscilloscope interfaces both use a rather unusual variation of the jelly bean 741 op-amp. This is the TI SN72741, which puts this op-amp in a 14 pin DIP package. Though they can be had on e-bay, I recently discovered that expediters.com has them for $5.50 each. They can be found at this link:http://www.expediters.com/index.jsp?path=product&part=845153&ds=dept&process=search&qdx=0&text=Sn72741

This SCELBI 8B power supply is built in a shadow box type chassis that is approximately 10″x5″x6″.

The internals are simply two Power-One linear Supplies, a switch, a fuse, 3 binding post type connectors, an amphenol 78S4 type connector and a fan. Here is an image of the interior. The fan is connected to the top, so isn’t visible in this view. The 5 volt supply is a C5-6 and the -9 is a modified B15-1.5. Be aware that the -9 supply is not powerful enough for a fully loaded 8H chassis.

SCELBI Power Supply Internals

SCELBI Keyboard Interface

Looks like I have enough parts on hand to build one of these babies up. It expects a decoded but unlatched keyboard. I don’t have one of these, so I’ll modify the firmware on one of my PS/2 adapters to act like one. With that I should be able to hack together a simple 8008 driver that will eventually work with MEA on the SCELBI.

SCELBI 8B Complete

Here is a complete, original, SCELBI 8B system that I was recently able to examine and operate. In the past, I already had examined the TTY and Cassette interfaces. This time, I was able to examine the power supply and will put up some posts in the near feature, including interior shots.

This document provides rework instructions that will bring the PCB up to the revision seen in the schematics. I now have a pretty good understanding of how this interfaces works and will provide more details in a future post.

Oscilloscope Rework Instructions

Back of SCELBI O-Scope Digital Board with rework highlighted

This is an image of the current state of the back sidelayout of the long awaited (by a few) digital board overlaid over an image of the actual board. Base image is curtesy of Jack Rubin, the only person I know, that has seen an SCELBI oscilloscope up close and personal in recent memory. This one is in the Computer History Museum’s off site storage facility.

I haven’t worked on any of the lettering, but I’ve gone through multiple passes of the rest of the board. Based on file size, this board is actually more complex than the SCELBI CPU board.

One other thing that I’m going to do is more study of the rework on the only known Oscilloscope digital board. The arrows in the image point to areas where rework was applied. Initial review seems to indicate that the schematics found at scelbi.com match the board after rework was applied. There is also a bit of rework on the front side.

The analog and keyboard layouts are ready to go, though I’ll probably give each of those one more quick design review pass before ordering a batch.

Link to SCELBI’s app on Apple’s App Store This is the same version (2.7) as available for download from my SCELBI web page. If you have used this version it would be great if you would review this Application on Apple’s App Store.

SCELBI Oscilloscope Analog Board

Here is an image of a SCELBI analog board. Overlaid on top is my current front copper layout and a silk screen layer showing component mix. As you can see, the layout is very far along, considering that I’ve only worked on it for parts of two weekends. There is still plenty of tweaking and checking to be done, but there is good chance that the layout, as it stands, would work.

Note that this board has several component locations without components stuffed and a couple of 56K resistors tacked on. There are no pads for these resistors, but they show up in the schematics and on the SCELBI placement diagram. I wonder if there was a second batch of cards made with corrections?

The 130 ohm resistors are listed as 100 ohms in the schematic. It would be hard to know why there was a difference without doing some experiments on actual hardware or a circuit analysis. This change could be functional in nature or do to using components that were close enough and on hand. The 3K resistors are listed as 3.3K in the schematics, but I think they used what was on hand, and there probably isn’t a functional difference in that case.

The pads in the lower left are for decoupling capacitors. I don’t know why they weren’t stuffed in this example. The component mix is pretty basic. There appear to be some film and mica capacitors. Based on what I’ve seen on other SCELBI boards, the transistors are probably 2n2222 and 2n2907 types, but I don’t have confirmation on that. Probably the most expensive parts to source are those pesky 72741 op-amps in 14 pin packages. They seem to be available on eBay, but the asking price is very high. I’m going to be on the lookout for a better source.

One final thing that threw me for a loop on this board. When compared to all other SCELBI boards, the DIP packages are mounted upside down. I’m going to have to pay attention when assembling this board.