MeghanIsMe

Among other things, my parents brought my scope with them!

Do these get heavier while you're away?

(This is me being conspicuously dorky. Sorry. 🙂 )

Tinkering success!

I cobbled together a good power supply for the iron that Mark Balliet gave me! I was having a hard time finding a barrel jack on a thrift store transformer that matched it, but eventually I bought a cheap little 7.5 volt, 3 watt wall wart with the right barrel, a Sharp power supply from something-or-other that provides almost 6 amps at 12 volts, and soldered the cord from the little one into the big one. I had to resort to a little saw on my multi-tool to get the little one open, but the sharp is in a much bigger package with press-fit snaps and screws and opened much more straight-forwardly. And actually went back together, unlike the other one!

How did I use the soldering iron without a supply for it? I found another wall wart with a jack that didn't actually insert much at all into the iron's receptacle, and doesn't provide near as much power as the new one does, but it made just enough of a connection to make it work until the job was done.

More about the Heathkit I'm trying to fix ( behind the cut )

My multimeter showed up today! I paid about $18 Canadian including shipping, and you definitely get what you pay for. But it works, basically. The rotary switch is a little...special. So I dug into troubleshooting the Heathkit!

It has 700 microamps across the meter when turned on with no probe connections. The meter reads full scale at 20, so of course it pegs. I'm pretty sure the problem is a bad transistor, either Q1 or Q2. Q1's source is connected with Q2's base and they read more than 8 volts to ground. The schematic suggests that measurement there should be about 5 volts. So either Q2 is bad, or it's running full on all the time because Q1 is bad. I think? I guess I'll order some transistors and find out!

Also the resistor measurements are all way low of spec! Not sure if it's a flaky multimeter, or measurements in-circuit are off, or if the resistors have just drifted after 60 years or so. Once I get a power supply for the soldering iron that Mark gave me as a birthday present (*so awesome!*), I'll take one off the board and check it out.

As I carried the replaced TV through the office to tuck out of the way in the back bedroom, I looked at my computer desk and made a suddenly obvious connection. I started to get things set up to connect it to my computer.

"Is it going to replace your smaller monitor?" Asked Danae.

In an incredulous tone, I responded "No...?" I mean, why would I do that?

Work is getting rid of their vintage Tattle-Tape machine and it has parts I would *love* to take home and work with, except I can't work with them right now...

Six *big* capacitors, wired in parallel. Two *huge* capacitors wired in parallel. one big transformer that looks to have more straightforward connections than the big toroidal one I have.

Also, in the giant pile of abandoned stuff we cleaned out of lockers, there was a nice stethoscope. I joked about taking up safe-cracking and Harry reminded that we have a safe. So I spent ten minutes or so listening to it and then read this. I wish I had to time to go through this process and try and open it; it looks like a ton of fun!

The last few days' activities have been marvelous, and relatively inexpensive. That's good because I'm feeling a little anxious about money. We've had only my income since early this year. That's enough to get by on, but I just paid property tax, which is not quite a month's worth of pay and it feels like a lot. And her health insurance through NW is ending very soon so I'm going have to deal with the bureaucracy and increased expense of putting her on my insurance.

I seem to be stuck on the monitor power board. I wish I had someone who knows what they're doing to walk me through things. I keep looking at things like Heathkit function generators online, thinking about how accessible and fun it would be to troubleshoot one and get it up to snuff, but I shouldn't be buying things at the moment.

I'm thinking about library school in some shape or form, but I don't feel like I can commit to that right now both because of money, and because Danae (and thus myself) will likely be moving somewhere, sometime. She's job-searching hard, and we don't know where or when we'll end up. The latest potentials are Penn State in Pennsylvania and a university in Toronto, Canada.

Honestly, I'd love to get out of the US right now. It feels like I'm living through a slow-motion governmental collapse. But my dad won't be able to visit me there easily because of complicated document issues, so that would be sad.

I've also realized I just don't know what I want to do, career-wise. What gets me excited? What am I passionate about? I don't know. I've been dealing with some anhedonia due to depression, so it's hard to be excited about much of anything. One of the things that I got most whole-heartedly excited about in the last year or so was reverse-engineering and fixing my VTVM. There isn't really a career to be made out of repairing half-century old equipment. I kind of still want to be an archivist. I loved helping people find things. But I just don't know. I've even talked to Danae about being a homemaker. If we had a child, and she was making enough money, I could do all the household stuff, take care of the kid during the day and while she's at conferences...that feels like it could be pretty fulfilling too. I'm just uncertain and confused about all of it.

Electronics and I have had a difficult weekend.

I replaced the drive belts in my CD changer and it's working just fine! It's back in its place on my audio shelves and I used it for music while trying to fix my computer. (More on that later.)

I got the power supply board out of my dead monitor and replaced the six big electrolytics with the new ones. No luck. I opened it up again and reflowed my solder joints in case I had a bad one. I turned it on and one of the caps snap-crackle-popped. Dammit! I left the thing for most of the day while I worked on other stuff. That evening, in a better mood, I looked again. I'd soldered the popped cap in backwards. That was stupid. I thought I'd been working so carefully, but I managed to turn it around during installation somehow.

One at a time, I tried soldering in two of the old caps that matched the value and still looked ok and that made the monitor *almost* work. It powered up and showed the menu screen for a split second, then powered down again. That makes me think the problem is still the power supply board and that it might still be fixable, so I'm going to order a good cap to replace the one I blew up and give it one more try. I feel like I could just about reassemble that monitor blindfolded.

At this point, I could probably find a thrift store monitor to replace the one I've got and it would cost less. But it can be hard to find a 20" monitor with a stand that rotates to portrait mode. And I'm sick of having to throw stuff out when it stops working to get a new one and filling up landfills. If I can fix this one, I wanna fix it, dammit! And I must be learning from the process too, right?

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I've been working on fixing a computer crash for a while. It looks like what happened is that my RAID 1 config got turned off in the BIOS (we won't mention that I'm the only person who could possibly have done that) so Windows was confused about booting and had to run it's self-diagnosis and repair. After that, I found that I had a J drive that wasn't there before, with all the same stuff as was on my C drive. My response to that reminds me of one of my favorite quotations from the guys at the hydraulic press channel on Youtube: "Wut da fook?" Then I realized what had happened and went back to the BIOS to fix the mirror. After a reboot, I got the classic "Invalid system disk" error, which I kind of feel like should be accompanied by a giant upraised middle finger, illustrating the situation you find yourself in when reading it. I think the whole mess must have started when I realized I didn't have analog sound because the hardware was disabled in BIOS. "Uh-oh," I said to Danae as I changed settings, "I'm in *advanced* mode. It's for real now." Little did I know...

So I got Windows 8 reinstalled, but it won't do Windows Updates. This seems to be a common problem, and maybe I wasn't getting updates even before the rebuild, but this time I wanted to fix it. I think fixing that mess of crap took longer than doing a rebuild, and it still isn't working right. I manually did all the updating using WSUS. So that's working again except for the software I need to reinstall to run things like my X-keys pad and my fancy mouse with three joysticks on it.

I have a few bits of old hi-fi gear I'd like to sell, as well as other electronics. Looking online, it kind of seems like I'd make more money disassembling certain things and selling a bunch of individual parts. But I honestly don't think I could do it; it would really hurt me to disassemble something old and unusual and functional and beautiful. But maybe I can take that into account if I go to one or two of the local hi-fi places (It's good to be in a city!) and ask about selling them.

I was talking in therapy about how intimidating it is to try to sell stuff or market myself. Trying to sell photographic prints at an art fair or online, for instance, is too intimidating to try. Similarly, selling used stuff; I always feel like I don't know what I'm doing, that my price is too high or too low and I'll look like an idiot, or that I'll be too willing to reduce my price and be an easy person to lowball and scam. I've had some negative experiences in the past that reinforce those fears. At the same time, I have some things that are worth selling, I want to learn electronics repair and selling things might get me a little money as I go, and I want to make some more room!

Trying to be confident enough (or able to fake it well enough) to try to sell a thing or two is now on my list of challenges for self-improvement.

I was looking forward to getting my UPS set up with the new batteries all day at work yesterday. When I got home and did, the unit made a soft popping sound and lots of magic smoke came out. I opened it up and found a very toasted capacitor.

That crashed my mood really hard. I had the whole set of depressive thoughts about how dumb I am and how I can't fix anything right, and I took the dog to bed for snuggles and a nap. Danae came in later and pointed out that I *did* fix the Marantz, that I've fixed other things, that so many people just throw stuff out without trying, and that she loves me for the way I care. That helped a lot, and today I am feeling mostly rational again.

That seems to be the way I am when I am recovering from a depressive span. I'll be feeling ok, but some minor setback can crash my brain for the rest of the day.

I'm still feeling frustrated about spending $30 on batteries that I may not have a use for. But I'm going to try replacing the damaged caps in the UPS (a second is obviously toast too), make sure I'm connecting the batteries correctly, and see if I can get it to work. Maybe the fried cap will have acted as a fuse and saved other things from whatever happened?

They're 200volt, 33 microfarad capacitors. Maybe I can find them as part of a kit so I'm not paying five times more in shipping than I am for the components.

The CD changer was straight-forward, and was exactly what I expected. The table drive belts are stretched and pop right off of their pulleys after I remount them. I just ordered a set that should be here in a week. Until then, the unit and several piles of CDs will be sitting around my workshop.