In this photo of the week we look at $100 USD rusty epay-special Agilent E5810A. These are nice boxes to interface the aging but still not yet obsolete GPIB-interfaced instrumentation.

I’ve already covered usage of these gateways in this xDevs.com guide.

Metal work in this unit is “well aged”. Connector housings seen better days and some corrosion is clearly visible.

RS-232 DB-9 connector is extra rusty :) I’d replace it with the new connector before putting unit back to service, just to have peace of mind.

Time to crack it open, which is easy removal of few Torx bolts and sliding the metal cover.

Based on date codes this gateway was made around year 2004.

Cheap power supply, but not cheap enough to have junk caps. They visually look fine :)

Upon power on unit went straight to static 192.168.100.230 IP.

Web-face worked fine once I hooked up to machine with similar sub-net IP LAN port. After fiddling with configuration it is now set to DHCP again.

Intro shows firmware version A1.02 which is oldest one. Branadic can deal with firmware updates, as it’s silly painful on these boxes.

Configuration screen:

It seem to be talking with my HPAK B2987A just fine though, so winner?

Update MAR.4.2023

The unit finally arrived at branadic’s lab and connected straight ahead to the network. To update the firmware an FTP server under windows 10 was set up, but unfortunately the unit declined the update with the message “Firmware updated not successful”.

Hence, an FTP server on Raspberry Pi in the local network following the instructions given here was implemented. Unfortunately, the unit still refused updating the firmware to the latest version, although it was possible to access the firmware file via FileZilla.

Eventually, the “Current Configuration of E5810 LAN/GPIB Gateway” was checked and observed that “I/O Timeout (sec)” was set to “0”. After restoring the factory settings of E5810A the firmware update worked straight away. It now runs A.01.10 and everyone is very happy :). Hopefully this helps other owners of E5810A in future.