Some random pictures from 2012 Rochester Hamfest. Most of the interesting stuff was in the outdoor flee market as usually:
2012 Rochester Hamfest
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Monthly Archives: June 2012
Upgrading an electric lawn mower to lithium batteries
Part 1- getting the platform
This all started when we bought a house and it came with a bit of grass. And grass wanted to grow and had to be cut. Initially I paid a lawn service to come and cut it, but they kept cutting bits I did not want them to. So I looked at the annual amount I was paying them and decided that would be my budget for a mower. Being an electrical guy, I very much dislike all things gas powered, stinky and noisy. So the absolute requirement was for the mower to be electric. I looked around a bit, and my choices seemed to be a bunch of no-name large box store mowers running Lead Acid batteries or corded, a few exotic European market-only Lithium powered mowers or making my own. I picked neither Continue reading
Dish Networks Model 1000 Satellite TV receiver
My old Dish Network receiver got finally obsoleted so I decided to take it apart and see what we can learn from the design. In the process we discover something unexpected
Lets take it apart!
Vintage Soviet components
I’ve stumbled on a bin of old Soviet electronics parts recently. Date codes range from pre-70s to 1990. Oh, the good old days when every resistor actually had its value printed on it (assuming you could trust that what it said actually matched the part), and nobody needed to remember color codes. Continue reading
Reviving an IBM ThinkPad X31
This is an old repair I did a while ago and posted on thinkpads forums. Reposting here to put it all under one roof. We have quite a few IBM Thinkpads X31 in the family. They are built like a tank and work well enough to keep using them despite 2003-2004 datecodes. One day two of them started exhibiting identical symptoms- they would just refuse to turn on. No lights, fans or other signs of life. Luckily I stumbled on a schematic on the web, so that was a good starting point.
Samsung saga continues- parts arrive
Well, if we remember the EEVblog episode 247 about parts arriving in pink bags, this beats it by a mile. The chip arrived in cling wrap! Continue reading
Samsung saga continues
Samsung streak continues. This time I am a proud new owner of a dead 23″ Samsung 2333SW LCD monitor from September of 2009. Dead is a bit of an overstatement, but that’s what the previous owner told me. Since the alternative was for it to go into a dumpster, I figured worst case I get a 23″ LVDS panel to play with. On to the symptoms: backlight seems to operate and the “connect you video source” banner is bouncing around the screen. When I do connect it, I see a brief attempt to display an image and then it’s back to gray. Time to take it apart. Continue reading
Samsung LCD TV repair
You’d think after almost a decade of blown caps on motherboards, that the OEMs would finally take care of that? Yeah, sure. I got my hands on a Samsung LN32A330 TV, made in June 2008. Pretty much a brand new thing as far as TVs go. Main complaint- it stopped turning on. So I plug it into my trusty Kill-A-Watt meter and try to power up. I see that it’s trying to draw some current, but then shuts down. Continue reading
Hello world!
Welcome to my blog of all things electronic. Let’s start with a family picture of my DMMs.
Left to right: ALDA M-838 DMM circa 1994; Wavetek Meterman 35XP- a handy DMM with a very annoying beep; Fluke 8842A- a high end instrument made in 1994 and still looking brand new inside (I’ll have to do a separate post on that), and finally my shiny new Agilent U1252A. You can never have too many of them- by the time you look at input current and voltage and then on the output currents and voltage, four DMMs seems like a bare minimum.