Collaborate Disseminate
A right-to-repair battle is being waged in courts. The results of it, we might not see for a decade. The Caps Wiki is a project tackling our repairability problem from …read more Continue reading Caps Wiki: Place For You To Share Your Repair Notes
We know what you’re thinking. It’s a bad power supply, of course it was capacitors to blame. But even if we all intuitively know at this point that bad caps are almost always the culprit when a PSU gives up …read more
Continue reading Chasing Down Bad Caps to Save a Troubled PSU
Fans of retro computers from the 8-bit and 16-bit eras will be well aware of the green death that eats these machines from the inside out. A common cause is leaking electrolytic capacitors, with RTC batteries being an even more vicious scourge when it comes to corrosion that destroys motherboards. …read more
Continue reading Save Your Original Xbox From A Corrosive Death
Anyone who pokes around old electronics knows that age is not kind to capacitors. If you’ve got a gadget with a few decades on the clock, there’s an excellent chance that some of its capacitors are either on the verge of failure or have already given up the ghost. Preemptively …read more
Continue reading Bodge Wire Saves a Vintage Mac SE/30 From the Heap
There’s a reason we often use the phrase “It ain’t Rocket Science”. Because real rocket science IS difficult. It is dangerous and complicated, and a lot of things can and do go wrong, often with disastrous consequences. It is imperative that the lessons learned from past failures must be documented and disseminated to prevent future mishaps. This is much easier said than done. There’s a large number of agencies and laboratories working on multiple projects over long periods of time. Which is why NASA has set up NASA Lessons Learned — a central, online database of issues documented by contributors …read more
[Matthew D’Asaro] was recently entrusted with an entire classroom fleet of fourteen broken Tektronix TLA5202 logic analyzers — a pile of equipment that once was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. His task: Fixing them. He fixed them all, and on the way documented a number of common failure points in these old but still great devices.
[Matthew] found that Tektronix’s portion of the electronics took the ravages of time and classroom use quite well, only the embedded desktop PCs inside the machines simply weren’t built for the ten-year. Some of the hard-drives had to be replaced, but most units …read more
Continue reading Repairing 14 Tektronix TLA5202 Logic Analyzers
