PhilCs blog / the latest things hes broken(fixed)

[rubber_jonnie]

I enjoy hearing about all your successes (and the sometimes difficult journey to get back to a working machine) especially as I keep finding my time is being taken with other things than my retro hobbies at the moment.

With my son preparing to start at Uni I might get a little bit more time for the autumn to make some progress on the backlog (or at least that is the hope!) but just in case that doesn't happen, please keep posting about these projects.

On a more positive note, work has just loaned me a Salae logic anaylser to try out (plus there is talk of upgrading some of the Rigol scopes to better models) so I might be able to try them out on a "personal project"...and the first candidate will be fixing the floppy access on my H5 board.

No @PhilC @rubber_jonnie I've still not had the time or space to set that up for fault finding but this might be the perfect opportunity! ;)

Sounds promising, keep us updated on how things are going.

[JezC]

Are you bringing anything to Cyber Legends?

Not sure I can make it yet - trying to re-arrange things so that I can attend. Fingers crossed...

[JezC]

[Sounds promising, keep us updated on how things are going.

Will do! Every time I think I'm going to get some free time some other event re-orders the priorities :(

[PhilC]

They were having a bit of a clear out at work, so I decided to save 2 laptops and 7 monitors from the scrap pile.

One of the laptops was an i3 which I’ve now used to replace my broken as in screen snapped all the way off chip programming laptop. The other one turned out to be a rev 7 i5 that had no sound and a dodgy touch pad. Turns out the touch pad now works but is a little dented and now I’ve turned the sound back on in the bios that works too.

The monitors are all 24 inch ones and turns out of the four I’ve tested so far, two of them will do 15khz as standard via VGA. So I’ve now swapped out my 19” NEC 1970NXp for a 24” Lenovo. The other one that works at 15khz is a Samsung, so that’ll be put to use.

So my old NEC and a few of the other monitors will be looking for good homes if anyone wants one?

[JezC]

@PhilC Yes, might well be interested in providing a rescue home for that NEC monitor (and possibly others)!

Do you want to PM me details of what you'd like for it/them? :)

[PhilC]

@JezC you are coming to cyber legends right? Collect it from there perhaps?

[JezC]

Still trying to re-arrange things so I can manage to attend if at all possible so yes, that would be idea! :D

[PhilC]

Today I got the CPC6128 out to try and sort out the video sync issue.

The symptoms are that the screen makes a random jump every couple of seconds or the whole screen goes out of sync but then returns to a nice stable screen for a few more seconds.

SO I've got the Scope out, got the 6128 connected up, was just reading the schematic whilst the screen jumped all over the place. Popped my scope probe on R137 which shows a typical sync waveform and now the bl**dy thing won't go out of sync again.

So I either had a bad connection on R137 or it now only does it when it's cold, not all the time like it used to.

I wish it would make its mind up! Time to power it off for half an hour and try again.

[stephen_usher]

By observing the experiment you change it.

[PhilC]

By observing the experiment you change it.

Very True Stephen, by pushing my scope probe onto the pad of R137 I inadvertently fixed a dry joint and the flickering has gone (at least for now) so I've just desoldered that joint and the CPC6128 is on test once again :)