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Mackie Mixer Repair

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ZOOMED_1202-VLZ3Another repair from my dad is this Maxie 1202 mixer, a 12 channel analog mixer, that has scratchy/noisy potentiometers, and one channel is reported as pretty much completely dead. Knowing it was all pots, and the unit was going on 20 years old now, I figured it was just dirty.

Taking the mixer apart was relatively time consuming, since you have to pull all the nobs. After removing the back, I did notice that the glue holding down the two power supply filter caps had lost hold, so that was added to my list of fixes (nothing a little hot glue couldn’t fix). I always find it interesting when companies use LM317’s and LM337’s for their power supplies. I guess it does let them set the upper and lower supply rails outside the standard ±5, ±9, ±12, etc.

Total time for disassembly was about 20 minutes. I made sure to index the screws using this handy mat. I also threw all the nobs into a bowl. Interestingly the upper and lower boards of the mixer are joined together by solid core, uninsulated, wire. So I had to keep the upper board slightly elevated from the lower one.

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Re:load Pro Monitor on Raspberry Pi

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RLP Monitor Raspberry PiNow that I have the Raspberry Pi, and the Re:load Pro, I wanted some way to monitor things. Luckily, someone else did the work! While I have no problem running it on the Mac, that defeats my purpose of the Raspberry Pi. So, I grabbed the source, and worked on installing it on there.

Here’s the long and short of it.

You need to download and compile node.js from source. This will take a LONG friggin’ time, so go have dinner. Watch a movie. Something. For me, it took about 2 hours to compile. After that, you need to install optipng, and libjpeg-progs (sudo apt-get install optipng libjpeg-progs). Finally, you have to install node-serialport (sudo npm install serialport). After that, you can install rlpmon by cd’ing into the directory, and running “npm install” (basically, follow the directions on Dean’s github page for the software.

After that, you’re good to go. Enjoy!

Repair of Asus RT-N16

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RT-N16 Rear (No Antennas)Late last night, my router went down. Checking it, I saw that the lights were all off. Huh. So, I unplugged and replugged it, and it came back up. Figuring it was a glitch, I went back to bed, and thought nothing of it. This morning, I found it was off again, and re-plugging it would do nothing. Crap.

So, I pulled it off the wall, and opened it up. Hey look, a bad capacitor. It’s labeled as a 680uF 16V cap, with a nice bulged top. After finding a replacement in my capacitor stash, I went about removing the old one… which was, a pain. Mainly because it’s on a huge ground plane, so heating the leads enough to get it removed was a challenge. Even my FR-300 desoldering gun took a bit of work to get things hot enough to melt. But, after about 5 minutes of working on it, I got the old one out, and the new one in. The new one is a bit taller, but it does fit ((And yes, I’m okay with a 16V capacitor in this case since the power supply is 12V (meaning a 75% derating) and the whole thing lives in my garage which is never above 20C. Yes, I know it’s above the minimum 70% derating, but not by much, and I didn’t have a 25V that would fit.)) ((Also note: Asus, at least on this board, paints their capacitor markings backward. Where normally the negative capacitor lead would go in the solid white marked hole, it is actually the positive as can be seen for all the other caps on the board. Why Asus does this, I have NO idea.)).

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