Maybe. The part number is partially missing, the drive itself has a part number of 70-13077-02, DEC badged. That maps to a print set of EK-13077-IP which doesn't seem to be anywhere online. Drat.

Looking at Wikipedia these seem to be in TO-18 metal cases. Maybe they are Gallium Arsenide LEDs?

However if it was current limited then running it up to 9v should not have killed it. Is it possible one can drive an LED hard enough to get it not to light after awhile at 5v levels but still have it light at lower voltage levels?

This should be simple to test with the other non-working drive: Put a 47 ohm resistor in series with the LED and see if it works. If so great, I'll ECO the other drives. If not then I can replace this with a standard IR LED, put in a damn resistor, and get it online again.

Still, it means the track zero LED can't be far behind assuming they did the same trick. Hm. Need to do more research.

CZ

On 10/11/2020 11:50 PM, Doug Jackson wrote:
Could it have been a 5V LED with integral current limit?

That would explain the odd behaviour.

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On Mon, 12 Oct 2020 at 14:33, Chris Zach via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org <mailto:cctalk@classiccmp.org>> wrote:

    Ok, this is weirder: I put the "bad" floppy drive on the bench and
    started to take a look at it. First I checked the LED (yes, it's an
    LED). With a bench voltage of 1.5 volts and a 100ma draw it lit up
    nicely in the IR (detected by phone camera, so nice they can see the
    light) and the photo transistor also seemed to work fine (at the sector
    hole resistance went from infinite down to about 500 ohms). That's
    good,
    so what is wrong?

    I noticed I could crank the LED higher current-wise to 150 ma and the
    voltage was still <2 volts. Interesting. Then I hooked a break-out
    harness to the pdt11 to see what kind of voltage it was putting out to
    the LED.

    It's putting out +5v whenever the unit is on. Maybe it's current
    limited? To check I hooked up the drive's plug to the breakout to see
    what the LED was seeing.

    +5v. And even weirder, the LED was not lit.

    What the heck is going on here?

    So I put the LED on the bench for a bit of a destructive test.
    Disconnected the PDT11 from the breakout cable, hooked up the power
    supply, turned up the voltage and the LED came on, then went *off* at
    around 3v. At 5v it was dead off, no IR light as measured by the
    camera.
    Turn the voltage down, and it comes on again. Up and it goes off.

    And unfortunately at 9v it died (CRAP!) as I turned up the current
    limit
    Yes, I forgot to set the voltage limit on the power supply, my bad,
    I am
    boo boo the fool...

    But this is weird: It looks like DEC put an LED in there with no
    current
    limiting, and a straight +5 volts. And the LED is always on at this
    high
    voltage? With no current limiting resistor? This does not make sense,
    but the volt meter don't lie. I'm going to check the working drive to
    see if it is limiting the voltage somehow. I'd say there was a resistor
    in the LED assembly limiting the current, but if that's true my
    cranking
    the voltage to 9v should not have blown it up, and it should not
    turn on
    at low voltages then off at 5v.

    Maybe the solution is to insert a resistor in series with the second
    drive at around r=e/i or r=5/.1 (100ma) or 50 ohms.

    Does this make any sense?

    C

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