A friend recently purchased a Pioneer VSX-452 Receiver at Goodwill for $15 without being able to listen to it fully. After taking it home, and hooking up some headphones, and speakers, he noticed the left channel sounded terrible, where the right sounded fine. He mentioned this to me the next day, and I figured “hey, I can fix that”. Especially after just reading a pretty decent book called How to Diagnose and Fix Everything Electronic. Anyway, I took the unit home, and set about diagnosing it.
Dell E173FPb Repair (BenQ)
I recently repaired a Dell E173FPb monitor from my wife’s work that would just start up black, with no “2 seconds to black” or anything like that. The common issue with these monitors is the backlight transistors on the power supply shorting. When I got the monitor, I pulled them, and indeed, a pair of them were shorted out, so I ordered some replacements through a pretty highly rated, Chinese, eBay seller. After receiving them, I dropped them in, and it STILL didn’t work. So, I ordered replacement FETs (since testing FETs is a bit troublesome at times), and those didn’t work either. Awesome… so I put the original FETs back, and set the monitor aside for parts.
A month later, I was ordering some parts from Mouser, and noticed they had the transistors that this monitor used, so I ordered a half dozen, to see if maybe they would work. After receiving them, I dropped them in, and viola, it worked!
So, it short, buy from real component retailers if you can, and avoid getting cheap counterfeit parts. You’ll save yourself a headache or two.
And here are some links to articles dealing with repairing this monitor.
http://www.badcaps.net/forum/printthread.php?t=6692
http://www.badcaps.net/forum/showthread.php?t=20295
http://www.badcaps.net/forum/printthread.php?t=9600
http://homepage3.nifty.com/anikikobo/hardware/benq_fp71g.html
http://www.badcaps.net/forum/showthread.php?t=14068
http://www.badcaps.net/forum/showthread.php?t=7649
http://www.badcaps.net/forum/showthread.php?t=12432
http://syscon.wordpress.com/2007/07/13/dell-dell-e172fpb-lcd-backlight-repair/
http://www.badcaps.net/forum/showthread.php?t=20295
http://www.ccl-la.com/LCDrepair5.htm
New Weather Station
I purchased a LaCrosse WS2316 weather station from Costco shortly after I bought my house in 2007, and have been sending data to Wunderground.net and CWOP since. But, alas, after nearly 6 years in service, that weather station started producing bad data a couple weeks ago, and it was time to upgrade.
Luckily for me, someone had just agreed to purchase my old laptop, and I had the money to both buy a new weather station, and upgrade at the same time. =) So, after some quick research (since a colleague had just purchased one himself and loved it), I picked up a Davis Vantage Vue and Weatherlink adapter online (review forthcoming). After a wait for shipping, and a couple days to the weekend, I finally got it installed on Oct 6th, 2013, and the data from it is now flowing and visible via the links under my webcam image. For reference, it’s installed 22′ 6.5″ above the ground on a 10′ AntennaCraft mast (purchased at Radioshack locally) that I cut in half, and flipped (effectively becoming 2x 5′ masts), and secured with Chimney mast mounts also purchased at Radioshack that I was previously using for my previous weather stations anemometer. This should make servicing the station easier in the future since I’ll be able to just take down the single 5′ mast rather than wrestle with a 10′ mast, the chimney straps, etc. I’m pretty darn happy with how it turned out, and especially the data I’m getting.
More when I post the review of the Vantage Vue itself.