Nicolet Integra 40 Oscilloscope

I was able to pick­up a non-work­ing Nicolet Integra 40 oscil­lo­scope for a bar­gain price. It was built in 2000 and is a 4 chan­nel dif­fer­en­tial input unit capa­ble of 20 MS/s with 12 bit dig­i­tiz­ers and col­or screen.

The Nicolet Integra 40 is some­what of a spe­cial­ty oscil­lo­scope, in that it was “designed specif­i­cal­ly for the mea­sure­ment of low speed, phys­i­cal phe­nom­e­na”.
It includes dif­fer­en­tial inputs on all four chan­nels along with a dual time base, and pro­pri­etary dual lev­el hys­tere­sis trig­ger for high noise envi­ron­ments. The mod­el 40 has RS-423, I/O ports, Centronics and GPIB inter­faces on the back panel.

My ini­tial thought when trou­bleshoot­ing why this unit would not pow­er up after check­ing the fuse was a pos­si­ble bad pow­er sup­ply. The sup­ply checked out with all the cor­rect volt­ages avail­able.
The next item I checked was the dig­i­tal pow­er but­ton, but that cir­cuit­ry also checked out good. I was start­ing to wor­ry that the proces­sor or eproms were pos­si­bly faulty. That is when I noticed a bit of cor­ro­sion around the NiCd back­up battery. 

A quick check of the bat­tery showed 0.1 volts, so a replace­ment was ordered.
In the mean­time while wait­ing for the new bat­tery to arrive the old bat­tery was removed and all traces of cor­ro­sion around the bat­tery were thor­ough­ly cleaned up.
While I had the time the eproms were read and saved to files using my TL866II Plus programmer.

I also took the time to clean all the pow­er con­nec­tors and pins with DeoxIT D5 clean­er which also made inser­tion and removal much eas­i­er as I worked on the unit.

While check­ing out the boards I noticed what looked to be two add-on mem­o­ry daugh­ter boards installed. The boards were pop­u­lat­ed with one IDT FCT16827CT Fast CMOS 20-bit buffer that can be orga­nized to oper­ate the device as two 10-bit buffers or one 20-bit buffer along with four ISSI IS61C1024 128K x 8 high-speed CMOS sta­t­ic RAM IC’s with 15 ns access time. I have no idea how these are orga­nized, but with a 16 bit bus these would pro­vide 512K of high speed mem­o­ry.
Unfortunately I do not have any spec­i­fi­ca­tions or doc­u­men­ta­tion for this model.

After receiv­ing the new bat­tery and installing it the unit still would not pow­er up. Only this time I was get­ting a small chirp sound and what seemed to be back­light­ing on the black LCD screen.
I did man­age to find an old YouTube video post­ed by some­one with a mod­el 60 oscil­lo­scope and they were press­ing and hold­ing what seemed to be the sec­ond from the top menu but­ton while cycling pow­er sev­er­al times before relays start­ed to click and then were pre­sent­ed with a COLD START screen.
This pro­ce­dure did not work with the mod­el 40 but gave me the idea to try oth­er but­tons on this unit.
Success!, the sequence that worked for me was hold­ing the “Hold Next” but­ton for about 2 sec­onds after pow­er­ing on the unit. Initially there was a slight pause, then the Time Base LED’s lit-up along with sev­er­al relays cycling on and off, then the start-up dis­play with the mes­sage “COLD START”. After that I pressed Auto Setup twice and was pre­sent­ed with the image above.
The scope works great and there are a myr­i­ad of menu set­tings and adjust­ments that I am only begin­ning to fig­ure out. Hopefully at some point I will find some doc­u­men­ta­tion so I can ful­ly uti­lize the capa­bil­i­ties of the scope.
Below are some addi­tion­al images inside the scope: