Gutless Lisa 2/10

[mst3k]

The good news: I've acquired for the first time in my long collecting life an Apple Lisa 2/10.
The bad news: The poor machine is gutless. No motherboard. No memory board(s). No I/O board. No CPU board.
It does have a power supply, CRT, FDD, all the right tin parts, the cage for the boards and a nice mouse and keyboard.
I'm monitoring eBay for bits and pieces, but thought I'd ask here to see if anyone might be able to direct me to any of my missing parts.
I've located a memory board, and I've been told that those boards and the CPU boards are interchangeable, but that I will need the 2/10 specific motherboard and the 2/10 specific I/O board.
Vintage Micros has the motherboard pan I need and I'm looking at his X-ProFile Kit if I ever get this running, but he is out of stock on everything else.
Anyway, it's lovely to look at, and it didn't cost much, so now I'm in full scavenging mode.
Any ideas or suggestions would be appreciated.
Thank you!

 

[Byrd]

As you spend up on parts, you'll probably exceed the cost of a complete unit. I'd look out for a non-working damaged/junker unit over single cards.

 

[mg.man]

I will need the 2/10 specific motherboard and the 2/10 specific I/O board.

That's true. You might, however, want to consider finding a 2/5 wiring loom, since the 2/5 motherboard (along with a few others) has been reverse-engineered :

GitHub - alexthecat123/Lisa-PCBs: Some Apple Lisa PCBs that I've reverse-engineered.

Some Apple Lisa PCBs that I've reverse-engineered. - GitHub - alexthecat123/Lisa-PCBs: Some Apple Lisa PCBs that I've reverse-engineered.

github.com

 

[mst3k]

Thanks for the good advice. I'm beginning to realize this may be a loooonnnng process.
Oh well, what else am I doing?

 

[Berenod]

You'll really have to get into those "Lisa" communities if you want any chance of getting your hands on the parts you need.

Those parts pop up on ebay every so often, but either at ridiculous asking prices, or they simply get bid up very high if there are a few people with a Lisa with just that part missing or broken.
Most of those would be willing to spend serious money on just that one part to get their Lisa operational again!

 

[mst3k]

Thanks for the reply and the advice.
Back in 2004, I purchased a 'non-working' Lisa 2/5 on eBay from a seller in Huntsville, Alabama.
When it arrived, after fixing a bit of 'stiction' on the internal HDD, the machine booted. Turns out it was a former NASA machine and had trajectories and flight info for several space flight projects. It cost me an exorbitant $700, plus shipping, and once I got it working, I sold it on eBay for the handsome sum of $975 (without saying what was on the HDD as my wife thought I could be arrested for selling government secrets. . To this day, I regret selling it. I started looking at the start of the pandemic for another Lisa and have yet to get my jaw off the floor with how the market has changed.
It seems my strategy for acquiring parts now boils down to the random waiting game of finding someone who has decided to sell...
That said, it's all good. I've got my NeXT stuff to play with while I wait and watch.
Thanks again!

 

[stepleton]

Ah, what a story! NASA was known as a major user of Lisas --- they're said to have really liked LisaProject for project management.

 

[Berenod]

Thanks for the reply and the advice.
Back in 2004, I purchased a 'non-working' Lisa 2/5 on eBay from a seller in Huntsville, Alabama.
When it arrived, after fixing a bit of 'stiction' on the internal HDD, the machine booted. Turns out it was a former NASA machine and had trajectories and flight info for several space flight projects. It cost me an exorbitant $700, plus shipping, and once I got it working, I sold it on eBay for the handsome sum of $975 (without saying what was on the HDD as my wife thought I could be arrested for selling government secrets. . To this day, I regret selling it. I started looking at the start of the pandemic for another Lisa and have yet to get my jaw off the floor with how the market has changed.
It seems my strategy for acquiring parts now boils down to the random waiting game of finding someone who has decided to sell...
That said, it's all good. I've got my NeXT stuff to play with while I wait and watch.
Thanks again!

Aaah, the spoils of our hobby, what you sometimes come by on those old harddrives!

Once picked up a Duo230, from an attic clean up, happened to be owned by a journalist from one of the major local newspapers, still had a load of his articles on the harddrive, some I was actually able to find on-line in the archives of said newspaper!

I ended up getting those files of the machine and into a modern format, and sent the to the family I bought the laptop from (his granddaughter and her husband), they were mightily moved by the archive!!!

I hope to get my Lisa going in the not so distant future, might even get the widget drive to work as well, already dreaming on what I'd find on there!

 

[mst3k]

Howdy,
An update on my Lisa adventure...
I went ahead and picked up another 'non-gutless' Lisa and between the two, I have a quasi working Lisa 2/10.
The 'gutless' Lisa had a near perfect case, power supply and CRT. The 'donor' had the memory boards, i/o and cpu cards.
I had purchased a motherboard on eBay and now have, like I said, a kind-of working Lisa.
What I don't have is a working drive.
I'm trying to rehabilitate one of the two floppies I have, and the donor machine came with a 10mb widget drive.
Here's where I could use some advice. The widget drive spins up and whirs and such, but not much else.
I found the repair guide for the 'brake' online and now have the satisfying CLUNK of the brake disengaging.
The drive head seeks back and forth and the indicator light shows activity, but after about 90 seconds the drive times out and I get an error code '81'. From what I can find out, that could be anything to do with 'communication'. The drive card has been examined and cleaned but I don't have the nerve to open the HDD itself and can't imagine that that would help anyway. I've moved everything between both machines on the off chance it had something to do with motherboards, connectors or cables (I guess it still might) but I still have the drive timing out and the error 81 message.
Any suggestions? Time for the bin?
Lastly, one of the two FDD's will actually accept disks, but then spits them out. Is there a route to getting it working? I've lubricated the friction points and cleaned the head with IPA.
Thanks in advance for any suggestions!

 

[mst3k]

I did a search of the forums and found out that doing nothing is probably best. So I am letting this thing run and keeping an eye on the drive arm. It currently only moves a 1/2 inch or so and looks like it is supposed to be moving much further so... we'll see.
I'm tempted to pull the cover and give it a push, but that seems a bit drastic at this point.

 

[Berenod]

I did a search of the forums and found out that doing nothing is probably best. So I am letting this thing run and keeping an eye on the drive arm. It currently only moves a 1/2 inch or so and looks like it is supposed to be moving much further so... we'll see.
I'm tempted to pull the cover and give it a push, but that seems a bit drastic at this point.

Nothing is maybe a bit too little
But yeah, do not open it, nothing to be gained an a lot to be lost!

I assume the widget is out of the Lisa, sitting in front of it with just the powercable and the flat datacable attached.

You can try booting with the widget in different positions, like horizontally on it's side, or standing on it's head.

With mine, when it is horizontally flat on my desk (like it would be while mounted inside the Lisa), it often doesn't boot.
Mine gets stuck with the hourglass at the screen and finally throw an 81 error.

When I put it on it's side, I get a much better succes rate in booting, but still not 100%. Like in the below picture:



When I then turn it 90° to the right, so basically standing on it's head, I get a 100% success rate.

Not 100% sure yet, but at the moment my best guess is the circuitry driving the voice coil (which moves the head) has lost some power (degraded caps maybe), making it move less accurate, like overshooting it's position when goin from one side to the other.

I can actually see and hear the arm banging against the stop at times when the drive is lying horizontally, this is already a lot less while positioned as in the picture, and it virtually never happens while standing on its head!

Obviously, don' try to move it while spinning, only when totally powered off!

 

[mst3k]

Thanks for the tip!
Your picture could have been of my desktop. My drive is setting just like that...
I tried turning the drive thru 360 degrees (boot-run-off-turn, boot-run-off turn-...) and weirdly enough, although I didn't get past the error it was obvious that the arm moved a further distance when the drive was on it's head. I'll mess around with it some more and see if it breaks loose.
Thanks again. That is honestly something I would never have thought of trying.

 

[mst3k]

Okay, I've run this thing for a few hours. I've tried it every which way. It still refuses to start and shows error 81.
After the drive powers up, the drive arm bangs back and forth continuously over a very short distance.
I managed to get a 400k FDD working and booted from it with BLU. BLU waits for the widget to respond and then says drive not responding. I've used BLU to 'reset' the drive and attempted to get into Low Level Format or Write Blu to HD just to see if it would respond. It continuously kicks back that the drive is not responding.
Any ideas? I don't have any other widget boards to try (in case one or both of them are the problem) but I've tried the drive with other known motherboards and cables to eliminate those possibilities.
I do have an X-Profile that works fine on this machine so I'm guessing I'm down to a bad widget controller(s)?

 

[stepleton]

Can you record a video of this happening?

Widgets are fragile. They are the first hard drive made by a company that had never made hard drives before, and it shows. At the (nearly) 40-year mark for the devices, you might think of them a bit more like Rubik's cubes --- puzzles to try and solve (i.e. repair) --- rather than storage devices. Unlike an ordinary Rubik's cube, some Widgets are not practically solveable.

As I've said in some other threads, at this point so few Widgets have been fixed that we don't really have a systematic knowledge of typical failures. (Compare to the Commodore 64 where people have the luxury of webpages like this!) Pretty much everyone can pitch in to try and help build this knowledge. A scientific approach to troubleshooting is the best way forward here: don't just try stuff to try stuff, work to understand the ways the Widget works, come up with theories for what might be going wrong, and do tests to validate or invalidate those theories. It's tough going but it can be rewarding if you figure out a problem --- even more so if you solve it!

Schematics for the Widget (available here) and archived technical documents from Bitsavers can be the maps on this journey. But it also helps to have a compass. Do you own a multimeter? How about an oscilloscope?

Congrats on your working 2/10!

 

[stepleton]

As for the problem, you could imagine all kinds of things being possible at this stage: bad servo, broken head amplifiers, controller on the fritz, intermittent connections, platters stolen by cunning thieves, spirits attempting to communicate by banging the heads in Morse code, etc.
We will need to collect more data and form theories to test.

 

[mst3k]

Thanks so much for the response and I'm betting on "spirits attempting to communicate by banging the heads in Morse Code"...
Here's the video of the drive spinning up, brake releasing and drive head banging away...

View attachment PXL_20230522_203343775.TS.mp4

 

[mst3k]

And I do have a multimeter, but no oscilloscope.
My skills are rudimentary but I am determined and I am good at following directions!

 

[mactjaap]

Looks like my “banging head” widget drive. Difficult. Hope for the best.

I had some succes with NeoWidEx.

In NeoWidEx you can give some commands to the disk where it can come back to live.

I made a small movie about it. https://www.youtube.com/user/tjabring

I also had some succes by helping the head. If it is banging just move it a little bit. Sometimes it finds the right track and starts up.

 

[stepleton]

It's funny, I can't see the video on my Linux laptop, but I can hear the sound, and from that alone it sounds like a familiar thing --- the arm not being able to swing fully through its entire range of travel. What happens is that after the brake releases, the Widget tries to swing the arm over a wide arc, and when it can't do that, it keeps trying over and over. You've also mentioned that the heads only move a little bit, which is another sign that this might be the problem.

What we've found over in Lisaland is that you can try expressing the servo manually through its range of travel to try and break up gummed up lubricant and other sources of binding. ONLY DO THIS WHEN THE DRIVE IS SPINNING AND THE BRAKE IS RELEASED.

It's not guaranteed that this will fix things, but this is a problem we've encountered before. I suppose this is the one circumstance where we do have a familiar kind of failure and the beginnings of a standard procedure for fixing it.

You can see a discussion about this here:

Widget servo twist

Widget servo twist

lisalist2.com

 

[mst3k]

Ok. I tried moving the arm with the drive running. There is definitely stiff, arm stopping resistance on the down stop.
I can manual push it in and out but the arm cannot make the full sweep on it's own. I'm not sure how aggressive I should be and after looking at the 'widget servo twist' discussion you referenced, there was talk about adjusting 'servo trim pots'. It wasn't clear to me if they were referring to the arm or the platter. I'm going to call it a day and check this tomorrow. There is soooo much resistance in that arm it feels like either an awful lot of gunk or something is binding. Anyway, thanks for the suggestions!