General Stuff(tm)

[rubber_jonnie]

The good news:

The new fridge/freezer has arrived!

:girldance:

The bad news:

The GM Tech2 car diagnostic unit is faulty. There are pulsating lines down the screen and it crashes and resets whenever you try to access any of the car diagnostic utilities.

Damn that's annoying, it was pretty expensive wasn't it :(

[stephen_usher]

The bad news:

The GM Tech2 car diagnostic unit is faulty. There are pulsating lines down the screen and it crashes and resets whenever you try to access any of the car diagnostic utilities.

Damn that's annoying, it was pretty expensive wasn't it :(

Yeah, over £500.

[rubber_jonnie]

Damn that's annoying, it was pretty expensive wasn't it :(

Yeah, over £500.

Wasn't it OK in the earlier pic you posted? Has it just died?

Are you going to try and get a refund from the seller?

Does it have to be that specific unit or will a more generic OBD tool work, as they can be had quite cheaply now.

[stephen_usher]

Yeah, over £500.

Wasn't it OK in the earlier pic you posted? Has it just died?

Are you going to try and get a refund from the seller?

Does it have to be that specific unit or will a more generic OBD tool work, as they can be had quite cheaply now.

Well, the display went iffy this morning when I'd had it switched on for a while.

Otherwise this morning was the first time I had a chance to test it on the car. It did some things OK, such as reading the EMU but as soon as I selected any of the diagnostic options the unit reboots. e.g.



I'm wondering if the software on the PCMCIA card is corrupted.

[rubber_jonnie]

Wasn't it OK in the earlier pic you posted? Has it just died?

Are you going to try and get a refund from the seller?

Does it have to be that specific unit or will a more generic OBD tool work, as they can be had quite cheaply now.

Well, the display went iffy this morning when I'd had it switched on for a while.

Otherwise this morning was the first time I had a chance to test it on the car. It did some things OK, such as reading the EMU but as soon as I selected any of the diagnostic options the unit reboots. e.g.



I'm wondering if the software on the PCMCIA card is corrupted.

Damn, that's not good for something that cost £500...

[stephen_usher]

I recapped the motherboard on an Athlon machine I saved from scrapping last year.

Basically all the "smaller" green and gold capacitors were shot. Even though which showed no signs of leaking were way out of spec, e.g. 1000uF 6.4V caps were in the region of ~250uF with 34% loss!

I removed one of the 2200uF green and gold caps and that was spot on spec. with minor loss, so I put it back and left the rest.

I removed one of the smaller black caps (1000uF 10V) to test that and that was completely within spec.

The machine boots right up now without issue, though the reported voltage on the +5V and 3.3V lines are a little low (4.8V & 3.1V) but that should be OK.

[rubber_jonnie]

I recapped the motherboard on an Athlon machine I saved from scrapping last year.

Basically all the "smaller" green and gold capacitors were shot. Even though which showed no signs of leaking were way out of spec, e.g. 1000uF 6.4V caps were in the region of ~250uF with 34% loss!

I removed one of the 2200uF green and gold caps and that was spot on spec. with minor loss, so I put it back and left the rest.

I removed one of the smaller black caps (1000uF 10V) to test that and that was completely within spec.

The machine boots right up now without issue, though the reported voltage on the +5V and 3.3V lines are a little low (4.8V & 3.1V) but that should be OK.

Was that a board from the time of the great capacitor plague?

[stephen_usher]

Yep. Lots of top sprouting green and gold caps.

[stephen_usher]

The ElkSD Plus 1 cartridge arrived today.

Other than the Byzantine requirement to have all the floppy images in a container file named BEEB.MMD which is the first file on the drive and internally indexed using a database file created and managed using Microsoft Access 2000 (nothing newer or older) it works well. All you need to quickly load games.

[stephen_usher]

So, the rest of the evening has been resoldering (with the Hakko and hot air) 32 6164 RAM from one of the "scrap" Apricot Xi motherboards to try to find the iffy memory as it's hanging during the memory test and I know from experience that the early ROM versions did this.

A bit of a struggle as the pins had been bent over prior to them being put into the board and the solder wasn't exactly fresh.

Anyway, one RAM chip in the second bank consistently failed the memory tester... until it didn't any more. But I don't trust it.

Tomorrow evening I'll install sockets and re-install the memory with a replacement spare 4164 instead of the iffy one and then I can test again. I may just fit the first 128K of RAM to begin with.