What I’ve been up to…
26 October 2008Not that anyone who finds my blog will actually CARE what I’m up to, but it’s my blog and I run this dog & pony show! 
My projects as of late have mostly been electronic in nature. I’ve actually had three projects on the burner:
Replacement of the capacitors on my Mortal Kombat 2 arcade machine’s CRT controller
This was far more time consuming that I thought it would be. Not because it took me an actually long time to desolder and replace the capacitors on the board, but ordering the CORRECT caps and waiting for them to be delivered took the most time. I decided to use Mouser for my components and they delivered as promised. I posted pictures of my extracting the CRT controller here. From what I was able to gather with some Google-Fu and the few English markings on the board, I determined it was a Wei-Ya C829HR CRT board. Of course there aren’t any cap kits for this board (for whatever reason), so I had to order all the caps (about 30) one by one getting their voltage and capacitance from the one’s that are currently on the board. The one cap that I wasn’t able to find (easily) a replacement for was this monster bipolar 75v 4.7uf cap.
FINALLY finishing my Replica 1 computer (which I posted about starting here… over a year ago)
I know, totally lame right? I’d like to say it got put down during the move and I forgot but I literally think it was just the time of year and I was tired of freezing my ass off in the garage with only the glow of a soldering iron to keep me warm 
So I picked back up the kit and finished soldering the rest of the 50-or so IC pins and fired it up. I got a response on the video port but when I reset I get random giberish. I checked and the oscillator is clocked in at 1mhz and voltage at the test points looks OK. I’m thinking it’s probably a bad rom. I’m currently e-mailing the project creator and he’s been very helpful!
Building a Blue Box
This year I decided to be Woz for Halloween (I figured Fat Nerd is an outfit I’d be able to pull off ) and I wanted to have a sweet accessory to go with my outfit of a vintage apple shirt, name tag and rockin facial har. I decided what cooler than actually building a function blue box! I found this schematic which seems to be the defacto one that everyone since the 80’s has been using. The down side? Exar no longer makes the XR2207 voltage controlled oscillators. I tried to get samples straight from the company, but no luck. I was able to find them through some IC resellers, but they wanted $30 per chip, so F’ that noise!
Again, I activated some hardcore Google-Fu and found this slick project by a website called ProjectMF.org. He used a PIC microcontroller to generate the frequencies which is waaaaay easier and makes sense in a more modern world I used his schematics and again ordered the parts from Mouser. I was able to solder together the power supply portion and will fire up the PIC programmer later this week! Super cool!
So anyways, I haven’t been hacking away on the code or software projects lately but I find my creativitiy comes and goes through phases. I’m just in a hardware one right now, but I’m sure sooner or later I’ll fire up Visual Studio again
Cheers!
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