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Cutaway diagrams of the ND cabinets

Educational cutaway drawings, one per cabinet, in the style of a period service manual: a three-quarter view from the front left, the side and top cut away along a red edge, every named part on a leader line.

Drawing Cabinet Built from
nd500-one-cabinet.png ND-500 in one cabinet, model 11 Book 2 chapter 12
nd500-two-cabinet.png ND-500 in two cabinets, model 12 Book 2 chapters 14 and 15
nd5000-large.png ND-5000 large cabinet Book 2 chapters 16 and 17
nd5000-compact.png ND-5000 Compact (COMSON) Book 2 chapter 8, ND-05.017 figure 3
nd5000-es-model-c.png ND-5000 ES Model C ND-830102 figures 15 and 16
nd5000-satellite-technostation.png ND-5000 Satellite and Technostation Book 2 chapter 20

Each PNG has an SVG beside it with the same name, which scales without loss.

The facts behind every drawing are in the matching file one folder up, for example ../ND-5000-LARGE.md.

What is drawn from evidence, and what is not

From the drawings. The stack order, which unit sits at the front or rear, and the height of each unit, taken from the nutclip hole numbers on ND's Book 2 sheets. The number of card positions in each crate. Which boards sit in which positions, from the maintenance manuals. The part names on the labels.

From the product sheets. Outer height, width and depth.

Schematic, not measured.

  • The depth of each unit front to back, where no drawing gives one.
  • The exact spacing of the hole grid, spread evenly over the inside height.
  • Which occupied card positions are shown filled in a crate. The patterns are illustrative of one configuration.
  • The Satellite and Technostation absolute size. Its proportions, 1 : 2.4 : 3.4, are measured off drawing 20066, but no dimension exists for that box anywhere.

  • Colour. No drawing states one, so each drawing takes the colour of its era from a photograph, and says which in its caption:

    Drawing Colour Evidence
    ND-500 one and two cabinet dark brown ND-560 brochure photograph, Norsk Data photo archive on the NAS
    ND-5000 large taupe brown photograph of an ND-5800 at Telemuseet; ND-SID001 calls it a "brown/beige cabinet"
    ND-5000 Compact red-brown front, greyer brown sides measured from Pictures/ronny/compact-wedge.jpg, see Hardware/ND-PHYSICAL-MODELS.md
    ES Model C Compact colours, not confirmed no photograph of the new ES front cover
    Satellite and Technostation light warm grey Technostation brochure photograph

    A later large cabinet, the tpServer in Pictures/ronny/tp-server-side.png, is light grey, so the grey belongs to the ES era, not to the 1987 ND-5000. - Samson CPU edge in the ND-5000 large drawing follows the photographs of assembly 320003 in the PCB archive: yellow handles, a column of LEDs, baby modules in layers.

Where one of these matters to a drawing, the drawing's own caption says so.

How to rebuild

The drawings are generated, not hand-drawn, so a correction is a one-line change.

python draw_cabinets.py                  (all six)
python draw_cabinets.py nd5000-large     (one)

Needs Python 3 and the cairosvg package for the PNG output. Without cairosvg only the SVG files are written.

File What it is
cutaway.py The drawing engine: projection, shaded solids, face decorations such as card slots, fans, louvres and bezels, painter ordering, and callout layout. Knows nothing about Norsk Data
draw_cabinets.py One function per cabinet. Positions are written as nutclip hole numbers where the drawings give them, so each line can be checked against its Book 2 sheet

Rules the layout code follows:

  • A callout points only at a part that is visible in that view. A part hidden behind another is either left unlabelled or drawn as a dashed line, the usual technical drawing convention for hidden detail.
  • A label goes on the side of the picture its anchor sits on.
  • Callout text uses | for a line break, so the layout file never needs a backslash.

Index: ../README.md