3 Jun
2008
3 Jun
'08
3:48 p.m.
Antonio Carlini wrote:
Tony Duell wrote:
I suspect most peoples' collections fall into two categories - the stuff that
gets used much more frequently than every few months, and the stuff that
hardly ever gets powered up at all. The former's less likely to need checking,
whilst if a system gets powered up very infrequently it's not much bother to
give it a proper checking first.
I was
foolish enough
to get it out a couple of mnths later and attempt to use it to power
my homebrew board. Alas something had failed in the PSU (I forget
what,
it might just have been a dry joint...) the +5V
output was at about
9V.
I can understand worrying about something that's not been used for
a few years, but if you check everything that's not been used for
just a few months, when do you have time to actually _do_ anything? The only thing I remember going phut round here is a
Rainbow
a few years ago - and that failed while trying to format a disk
(so it had been running happily for a morning or so while
I was playing with it).
I've had all sorts go bang. The last system I worked on had a PSU fault where
the +12V rail would no longer supply rated current - at startup the supply
would invariably go into a loop where it'd detect a fault and shut down, only
to try coming back up again moments later. I never did 'scope the +5V rail,
but it wouldn't surprise me if there was all sorts of potentially-damaging
noise on it under those cycling conditions.
When I get around to trying out the 380Z I'll most
certainly
not plug it in and hope (have you seen the size of the cap in
that beast?)
I've seen two types in 380Z's - some have much smaller caps, but like you say
some of their PSUs used ones that were huge.
I still need to debug my system properly sometime - it blows fuses when the
little RGB analogue board is plugged in (I used to use it with composite
output all the time, so I never quite got the necessary tuits together to fix it)
cheers
Jules