Recently I picked up a very awesome vintage IBM 3705 front panel.
In its current state it is hardwired into relays and knobs to display random 'blinkenlights' and tune a built-in radio.
Already awesome, but its showing its age and the wires have become very fragile.
I want to try and modernize this system with nice warm LEDs and have an unlimited range of control how the lights go on and off and i guess Arduino is the way to do it ?
I have no experience but its seems very affordable and do-able for a newbie like me.
There is even more than enough space in the case for a small pc so the possibilities are endless.
WOW, that brings back un-fun memory of the 360/370 days....
It has obviously reworked ( as a radio receiver control panel???), so you/we have to make a few basic assumptions. The original 3705 (front-end communications controller, as I recall) front panel worked off of 28Vdc and (mostly) 12Vdc. Like just about all equipment in the 360 & 370 series, all the lamps are 12V incandescents and it will be really hard to find replacements. If I were undertaking your refurbusing project, I would strongly consider replacing the lamps with LEDs. Without knowing what you want the thing to do when you are done, there really isn't much more that can be said. (one last finishing note: the address/data rollers and five rotary switches at the bottom are made up of stacked wafer switches and are a real bitch to decode (until you remenber that they decode to hex), so remember your old wiring connections as you replace them.)
We need a whole lot more information to be of any assistance.
The big bulbs are GE44 and are all dead and about half of the panel indicators too, can't find replacements anywhere so LED seems the way to go.
The rotary switches are wired up directly to random lights. I have never seen these before in my life but im pretty sure those 'wafers' are not complete anymore.
