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  6. LS 6500 and WYSE Thin Terminal BIOS defaults

Discussion Category:  Scintillation Counters

LS 6500 and WYSE Thin Terminal BIOS defaults

I spent the past few weeks troubleshooting our LS 6500 after the Thin Terminal LCD panel died (WT9650XE). Tried to work around the issue by using a PCI graphics card and external monitor, but it only ever displayed the "Wyse Winterm" yellow box screen and beeped, never advancing to the Beckman counter layout. As such, I went ahead and replaced the soldered-on LCD breakout with an actual HD15 VGA port. While I could confirm the port worked, it never gave a readable signal for a monitor. However, during the process I had reset the CMOS and erased the BIOS settings, which might have caused this. Does anyone recall the correct BIOS settings to get the terminal to recognize and boot from the Beckman IDE drive? Or perhaps it is fine and there are secondary issues I've overlooked. I have some photos of the setup here: https://photos.app.goo.gl/TGbgKNUgeYu3MPQg9 As a side question, I had also tried to use the PC Software Library to at least communicate with the 6500 using a regular PC over serial, but it failed to run on any modern computer. Has anyone had luck communicating over serial without the Wyse terminal, and alternative software for it?
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Asked by

ekurt1
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avatar placemarkReply by
dpkleessr

If the LS Counter never initializes NORMALLY, which means that it boots up through the correct terminal or thin client, then any other software such as the PC Win Connect software will not function either.  That is just how they were designed in part to prevent people from doing what you are attempting as well as providing the standard output to the display.  EVERYTHING about the firmware in the terminals or thin clients was proprietary to BCI and configured to work with whichever vendor they ended up doing business with.  When I retired back in 2012, the only option available for ANY LSC that had a display failure was to upgrade to the thin client but after the LSC product line was obsolesced before I retired then even basic parts became more problematic with the upgrade costs to get the thin client becoming ridiculous if the customer did not have a total service agreement.  The thin client LCD was just a train wreck to begin with even when it came to service using our diagnostic cards which is partly why BCI went with a thin client connected to a standard LED display.  As to the BIOS settings I never really had to do anything like you are attempting to do and nowhere in my service notes is there any mention of that information either.  I know others have posted about a company in California that actually wroks with the displays and clients so if you haven't yet searched yourself check out the other posts about this product.

Don

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avatar placemarkReply by
ekurt1

Thanks Don!

I appreciate you looking over the old service notes for the terminal. I did see earlier the other posts related to those third-party replacement terminals to give the instrument modern peripherals and an external monitor, and I had confirmed with the company that their system definitely works. I am certainly not without options there, but I was more curious if anything could be done to resurrect the current LCD terminal without investing much into a replacement. Our lab and collaborators don't use the LS 6500 as much as we used to, so it's a tough sell.

-- Evan

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