24 Feb
2008
24 Feb
'08
2:59 p.m.
On Feb 24, 2008, at 2:16 PM, Tony Duell wrote:
I would argue that component-level repair _is_ rapidly becoming a lost
art.
Apart from people on this list (and it's not even universal here) and
people
doing related hobbies like vintage radio repairs, component-level
repair
is alas very rare now. Even TV repairs (at least in the UK) have become
board-swapping with the advent of the plasma panel and LCD TVs (most
manufactuers of such sets do not supply schematics, and don't supply
the
ASICs other than on the PCB).
What's more worrying to me is that the ability to diagnose a fault
seems
to have gone as well. We've had this rant to many times that I don't
feel
like starting it again...
Sure, I agree with those points, but I don't necessarily think that
means people are *incapable* of component-level repair.
I recently got a new job (I was laid off awhile back; the ISP
industry isn't what it used to be) in which I'm doing hardware design.
I was hired to bring some experience to the team; the other two
engineers are frighteningly intelligent but are still in college as EE
students...lots of knowledge, but very little practical experience. I
believe that either of these guys (for example) could easily do
component-level repair if they were asked to do so.
The ASIC problem is a biggie; there's no getting around that. But
lots of things are still quite repairable.
anyone do or know of anyone doing repairs on
vaxstations?
is this a lost art, and I should just buy another one off ebay or
what?
I'd love to find someone who did hardware repairs/engineering for dec
or still knows the stuff.
It's far from a lost art; anyone with reasonable electronics skills YEs, AFAIK there were never published schematics for
the VAXstations.
And
since (from the few I've looked inside) they're full of custom silicon,
it's going to be very hard to produce meaningful schematics of such
machines.
Well, schematics including the custom silicon as blocks with pins
(much like a Z80 or something) that could allow one to narrow down the
failure to (say) one particular chip, which could then be replaced.
Getting the chip might boil down to stealing it from a scrapped board,
but if that's the only option, well..
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL