Olivetti ETV 240 TypeWriter DEMO, DISASSEMBLY and REPAIR

Olivetti ETV 240 TypeWriter from 1986

Oh, what is this? A typewriter? A computer? Actually... it is a typewriter that tried to occupy the computer niche back in the mid 80's. It's a really akward invention but i guess that it was suitable for those who couldn't aford a computer back then but still wanted to enjoy some of the benefits of one.

Unfortunately this didn't even powered up when i first tried it (nevermind the fact that the monitor is on at this point ;P ). It was a nice excuse to take it completly apart and take a look at the motherboard and see what CPU it uses. Also notice that you can add two floppy drives to store text. Pretty neat for a typewriter, although unfourtanely this particular model didn't came with those.






Wohaa, can you see it? It is the good old Z80. Damn this old cpu was used for everything really. I mean...this is a typewriter!





The real reason why the whole unit was dead was obviously the power supply. Some of the capacitors on the secondary side of the power supply were dead shorted.





Easy fix really. Capacitors replaced and I even decided to restuff two of the capacitors here just for the looks.

With this problem out of the way, i just faced another. This time around mechanical wise.






Minor upgrade. Kidding :)





So with the printing assembly of it was time to disassemble it.





The grease had hardened and the mech was filled with it all over the place.






Another example of hardened grease. This gearbox underneath the printing assembly was completly "frozen" in place.






With everything cleaned and regreased it was time for a full assembly and retest of the typewriter.





This was almost a success. Everything moved great and nothing was stuck, but while the typewriter was printing, the characters were way of. If i typed a "1" for example and i would get a "Q" instead. All because of a misaligment in the three black bolts in the mechanism shown on the right here in the picture above.






The three black bolts allowed the mechanism it was holding to move either clock wise or counter clockwise. Well this said if the mechanism was out of aligment i would get either the next or the previous character in the margherita instead of the desired one.





Now the typewriter was fully operational at last! All that was left to do was to clean the keyboard and assemble the whole thing.






This 27 years old keyboard it way much cleaner than my modern keyboard, any day of the week :\

Keyboard base and keys all cleaned and ready to go.






The keyboard innards.





A view of the functions board.

By the way let me show you the guts of the CRT.





Eberything here looks new, like never used, really really clean!





Better view of the CRT neck, the one that shoots the green phosphors all over with electrons :)
Oh the green monitors...Maybe i'll use this monitor for a Matrix mod, who knows!






One neat thing is that i still have the original manual, brochures and warranty papers!


And now a video of the whole thing in action.
Enjoy!

Battle of giants! - Kitten vs broken CR-Rom

Don't worry, this drive was so toasted that any computer would only recognize it as S@mrung instead of Samsung!

My cat certainly enjoyed it!

Hard Drives: Old(1994) vs New (2012)

This is a quick post. Somewhere this year (2012) i got myself a neat 2TB harddrive (model WD20EFRX ) for my NAS (Network Attached Storage) and decided to take my 1994 261,30 MB hard drive (model ST3290A ) out of the shelf just to visually compare them.

Thats it boys and gals! On the left we have a 261MB hard drive and on the right a 2TB hard drive. Thats not even GigaBytes but MegaBytes!! Mind you that 1GB is 1024MB and the same logic goes for TB to GB.
So the hard drive on the left has about 0.01% of the storage capacity of the hard drive on the right.

We've come so far...

 A view of the back of both hard drives.



See you again in 18 years, HardDrive technology!
To be honest in 18 years i bet mechanical hard drives will be history in the desktop computer\laptop plataform and SSD will be the prefered way to storage our data.
Prove me wrong future readers!

Demo and Disassembly of the Casio F-91w

Back in 1992 +/- i felt like a modern little man because i got my first Casio F-91W. It didn't last 3 months. Not because the watch was poorly designed or had major weaknesses but mainly because no watch used to last more than 3 to 5 months with me as i was always disassembling them and testing them underwater, sometimes boiling water, overvolting, etc, etc...Yeah i was a little maniac.




Today these clocks and other variants are a retro-fashion. Also they were\are used a lot in bomb attacks and actually giving them an unfair bad reputation for being a terrorist watch. This couldn't be more unfair because any alarm clock can be used for a bomb, you just need how to connect it to the circuit. I'm not going to tell you :) Although you might already know. Don't bomb anyone please, and enjoy these little but awesome early 90's clocks.

Here you can se various variants of this clock. The one on the right is a Casio A158W and it's the one i use, the gold one on the is a A168 and belongs to my wife. The white one near to the F-91W is a fake Casio clock.

This clone stinks of fake as the LCD segments look different from the original Casio LCD, the beep alarm sounds different and even the display light mimics cheesy discoparty collored blinking lights.

I disassembled both and putted them side by side for comparison.

Here you can see the brains of the original Casio clock. Simple and elegant (apart the unevenly spreaded blobby epoxy over the IC).

Here is the fake one. Urgh!





I did a small video demoing both and disassembling them, showing some of the features!

Enjoy!

Acer Aspire 5600 Series DISASSEMBLY AND REPAIR

Acer Aspire 5600 Series with a bad LCD

Today i have this laptop with a faulty screen. So at least i was betting that it was the screen that was faulty since i could get a good video signal output through the VGA port, but before disassembling it i had another thing in mind.

I should try to shake slightly the cable that connects the main laptop assembly with the screen as it is very much subject of violence through all it's life with screen open\close cycles. For this i only had to remove the top faceplate with the power button which was remarkably hard to remove, probably the hardest one ever. That or i just wasn't doing it right :)

Turns out that wasn't it, so i really had to disassemble the screen. I would only want to do this as a last resort.

After removing the screws around the screen (that are usually covered with small plastic dots), i had to remove the lcd screen brezel using an old credit card so that i wouldn't "hurt" the soft plastic.

Twenty screws later and a few sweat drops, i had the lcd freely standing on my bench. Time to inspect it.

Model number just in case i need a replacement.

 I started peeling the duct tape around the edges in order to find the chips-on-film display drivers. I suspected it could had some bad connection between them and the LCD.

And here they are. Three of them at the left side of the screen.

A closer look.

With the LCD connected to the screen i tried to move them back and forth really...i mean REALLY gently, and guess what..

I was able to get a full picture on the display. But in order for that to happen i had to keep constantly pressing the chip-on-film lcd driver in that position.

Nothing a small roll of duct-tape filling that gap couldn't handle.

And here it is with everything in place. Bare in mind, this LCD is permanently damaged (probably due to some drop or physical violence) so this fix isn't permanent at all. I expect the problem to reappear and to get  worse and worse eventually leading to a screen replacement. But this is better than nothing, and there is a slight chance that this will last for long this way. Time will tell.

Everything is assembled and working. I really hope this lasts for a while, as someone seems to need to play some Counter-Strike on this :)
Nice wallpapper by the way.

MacBook Pro A1260 TIP

MacBook Pro A1260 with damaged GPU

 If this happens to your MacBook Pro and you know that your GPU is a Nvidia 8600m GT, have no fear! Also, don't try to fix it, don't do anything!

This is caused by the GPU due to a packaging defect. The symptoms are artifacts on the screen and no DVI output. Apple takes full responsability for this and will replace your whole motherboard for free!

Here is a quote from the apple support site:

"In July 2008, NVIDIA publicly acknowledged a higher than normal failure rate for some of their graphics processors due to a packaging defect. At that same time, NVIDIA assured Apple that Mac computers with these graphics processors were not affected. However, after an Apple-led investigation, Apple has determined that some MacBook Pro computers with the NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT graphics processor may be affected. If the NVIDIA graphics processor in your MacBook Pro has failed, or fails within four years of the original date of purchase, a repair will be done free of charge, even if your MacBook Pro is out of warranty."
 
You can read more here http://support.apple.com/kb/ts2377 . Actually i would advise you to print this before going into an Apple store.

 

Do this before it is too late! You have four years counting from the original date of purchase!

XFX GeForce 9600gt Alpha Dog Edition autopsy

XFX GForce 9600GT Alpha Dog Edition from 2008\2009

 

 

This must be the first unboxing of an already used and dead item on a blog i guess.

 My beloved graphic card that gave up the ghost a week ago because of a stucked fan. It's a Geforce 9600GT overclock edition. It performed nearly neck to neck to the geforce 9800GT, and i got as a RMA replacement of my former Geforce 7900GT (second hand) that decided to add funny artifacts all over the screen when i was playing something. So this 9600GT must be my first hand graphic card that died on me.

This is a picture taken in 2009 a minute after it was unboxed for the first time. Bellow you see a Geforce 3 ti500 (king of graphics back in 2001) as a size comparation.

Here i removed the cooler faceplate and you can see that the fan has been scratching for a while on it.

 After pressing on it i could see that the fan bearing was all weared out as i could make the rotor bounce back and forth quite easly.

Ouch. Burned plastic near the fan. This puppy must have been heating quite a lot before dying.

 I should remove the cooler now for further inspection. For this i had to remove four screws on the back of the card.

 This card uses a black pcb and even so it has quite noticiable burn marks between the ram chips.

 More of the same here. This card is completly unrepairable now.

 Most voltage regulators were completly shorted although i measure them in circuit, so the circuitry around them could be shorted, or both. This justifies why the computer immediately shutted down when i tried to power it up. The PSU short-circuit protection kicked in just in time before anything else was damaged. Replacing the voltage regulators would be pretty futile as the memories are burned for sure and who knows what else is burned here. Besides each voltage regulator should be at least 1 or 2 euros, plus a new cooler, and the risk of it not working in the end make this repair not worthy at all. Out to the recycle bin you go! :(

 Oh this is the key for the 3DMark Vantage that came with the card. It's yours!

 This card shortlived as i would expect more years out of it. Why would you ask in a day and age where this sort of item becomes obsolete within 2 years? Because computer hardware remains with me as long as it works and it is still useful. I retired a Pentium 3 with a voodoo 5 one month ago as the motherboard and the memories were getting completly faulty giving me errors and all sort of weird symptoms.

Well now i have the perfect excuse to get a new graphic card :)