But Karra’s older brother Markus did.

What a happy robot

Now, Omni here hasn’t had the best time during the past 25 years.  He’s been living in a back corner of my in-law’s basement or garage, getting grubby and being un-loved.  Fortunately, I got this little guy before he went into the garage sale.  I think I can rebuild him.  Better… stronger… faster.

I’ve never seen the six million dollar man.  But Robots are awesome.  So are tape decks.

You think this inspired wall-e?

I’ll be writing a step-by-step tear down log soon, but I’ve got a lot of pictures to comb through.

I forgot about HTML5.  That’s okay, it’s not really a “thing” so much as an idea.  I went back to playing with PHP, SQL, Javascript, and the like.  Learned about AJAX, which is pretty cool.  I’m working on a video game.  I’m always working on a video game, and have never finished one.  In fact, the last programming project I finished was a DOS based multi-drive CD player interface in Pascal.  In 1998.

I finished my amp.  I attached the proper ground wire to a chassis ground, and cleaned the contacts on the LEDs, now the lights light and the buzz is gone.  Success!

Swapped my Mushkin ram with some crappy OEM stuff out of a DELL.  1/2 the size, but it hasn’t bluescreened since (and that was like a year ago).

I’ve taken a bunch of pictures of the stuff I’ve been working on, and I’ll get to posing it later.

Okay.  Yeah.  Carry on.

Still doesn’t work.  Something in the /boilerplate dir is screwing it up.

Totally was.  the HTML5 boilerplate .htaccess file included

# you probably want www.example.com to forward to example.com -- shorter URLs are sexier.
#   no-www.org/faq.php?q=class_b

  RewriteEngine On
  RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.(.+)$ [NC]
  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://%1/$1 [R=301,L]

which I had to change

  RewriteEngine On

to

  RewriteEngine Off

to keep from redirecting to the wwwroot, which is this blog.

Windows 7 never crashes

It’s a little shaky from the rage, but here’s what I get.

MEMORY_MANAGEMENT
 *** STOP: 0x0000001A (0x00041790,0xC080204E,0x0000FFFF,0x00000000)

That’s pretty technical.  WTF.

There are suggestions online for this.  Raise the memory voltage.  Replace RAM.  Replace video card (done).  ”On Vista and Win7 you can run mdsched.exe — once rebooted to the scanner press F1 for Advanced options and run the “extended” tests.”  I don’t see how that could catch something that MemTest86 can’t, but what the hell.  Some say it’s Google Chrome’s fault (No).  Drop the RAM frequency.  CPU temps too high (no).  I already rebuilt my pagefile and ran the intel rapid storage tool to verify the drives on my RAID array.

Everyone thinks they’re a goddamn expert with computers.  The flood of misinformation is insane.

So running BlueScreenView gives me some other cryptic messages.  16 blue screens in 17 days.

And it crashed while writing this.

On reboot, I dropped the RAM from 800 to 667 MHz, and upped the DRAM Voltage from 1.8V to 2.0V.  Just for shits and giggles.  I also ran mdsched.exe to scan the ram on the next reboot.  This BlueScreenView Report shows what I’ve dealt with the past two weeks since installing Win7.

Mushkin Enhanced EM-6400 5-5-5-18 pulled out and laid out

Still locked up with lower RAM speed and more volts.  mdsched.exe said I had RAM errors!  Ran Memtest86+ v4.0 again, and passed, but I tried probing the memory size and it locked up and scrambled the screen.  Don’t know if that’s normal.  I put it back to stock speed and voltage, re-probed in memtest, same problems.

Here's where they moved

Switched from slots 0+2 to 1+3.  Probed the memory size, and it didn’t crash.  It still runs dual channel interleaved, so I’m going to try it like this ’till it crashes.  Then I’m going to pull a stick, and then swap sticks.  After that, I’ll get new RAM, and then I’ll shoot myself in the face.

Mushkin has a lifetime warranty on RAM.  I’m hoping my motherboard just has crap slots, and that everything is fixed now.  They still sell this kit for $80 locally, but they don’t sell single sticks, so if one is gone, I’ll want to replace both.

Quick update: It’s still broken.

Small bottle of Contact Cleaner. Alcohol in a spray can

This stuff is magic.  Sprayed my scratchy pots with it, spun them back and forth a bit, and the loosened right up.  At first I thought I’d wrecked them, they got so loose.

These are the "Sealed" potentiometers

There is a small indent in the top of the cases of these pots.  I think it’s for the mechanical stop for the knob.  Since they’re stamped through the case, they left nice little holes to flood with contact cleaner.

No more electrical tape

I grabbed a variety pack of heat shrink tube.  On sale for like $4!  I don’t know if it works better than tape, all my old tape joints are still holding out, but it sure looks cleaner.

I have lots of these

Computer power supplies are a good source of decent wire.  This particular unit is barely-atx out of a PII 300ish.  20 pin MB connector and no PCI-E.  Will make a good bench supply, since old ATX supplies have more power on the +5V, where newer ones focus on the +12V rail(s).

Nice long, heavier-gauge wires

I’m sure I’ll use the molex connectors later, not so sure about the berg connector.

Separate grounds

The two signal lines have colours, the two ground lines are black.  This is going to cause problems later.  But I’ll get to that later.

Lumpy connections

The resistors that were on the signal lines when I took the amp apart were re-used  Soldered in-line before the signal lines join up.

Tinned and soldered

I de-soldered the old wires this time instead of just splicing into them.  Tinned the new wires, soldered them in, and trimmed them.  The pic is pre-trimming.  I also de-soldered the pilot and clip LEDs.

Turbo goes in everything. And contact cleaner is no good for the skin

I scavenged some LEDs from the bottom of my old computer toolbox.  The last computers that came with “turbo” modes were 486′s, but these LEDs came out of a 386 SX Desktop (when desktop was the opposite of tower, ie. it sat flat on your desk).  That means the computer this came out of was made between 1988 and 1992.  The youngest this LED could be is 18 years.

Sounds soft

I jammed everything back together, tossed in the old pillow, and fired it up.

Can you spot the difference?

Okay.  So I had some success and some failure.  First, the pilot light doesn’t come on.  Maybe it’s from using 20-year-old LEDs, maybe I got the polarity wrong.  Either way.  Fail.  I’ll switch the legs around later (I used connectors on the LEDs just in case, but hot glued them to the chassis.)

What the jacks used to look like

Second, I’ve got a ground loop somewhere.  Buzzes something fierce.  When I touch a patch cord to the handle brackets on the top, it stops.  What to do?  Well, when the amp came apart, the two ground leads from the input went different directions.  One to the circuit board, one to the chassis, with a jumper across the jacks.  I removed the jumper and ran both to the board, and none to the chassis.  I guess my old hack was better than my new one.  Live and learn.

But my current PC hates me and hates windows.  I’m running a Core2 E6300 at stock 1.86, 2 sticks of 2GB Mushkin 6400 in dual channel, Two 36GB WD Raptors in RAID, and a gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3R motherboard with the latest bios.  And the problem is with one of those things.

I borrowed an EVGA 8800GTS video card when I built it.  It never ran very stable, and the video drivers would reset under Windows 7.  I had five hard drives in my case and a 480W Antec TruePower power supply, so I figured it was a power issue.  Took out three of my hard drives, put them in my NAS box, and ran it for a while.  More problems, more issues, so I installed Ubuntu.

I have no stability issues under Linux.  Unfortunately, as good as Ubuntu is for me, the wife and kids need Windows.  (Stupid Roblox does not work in WINE or in Virtualbox, and iTunes doesn’t agree with Linux either.)

So in goes Windows 7 Ultimate.  Video driver restarts all over the place.  Registry edited to change the video driver reset timer.  Problems are less frequent, but it blue screens instead of restarting the driver.  Out goes the 8800GTS, in goes a Sapphire Radeon HD 5770.  Good 3D, less power-hungry, ATI instead of NVidia.  Same problems, less frequent.  Changed all bios settings to the safest, slowest, most stable.  No change.  Update to the latest bios, no change.  Borrow a Corsair VX550 power supply to replace my aging and underpowered one.  No change.

I hit MemTest 86+ (newish version, on the Ubuntu 10.10 liveCD), let it crunch away for a while.  Passes with flying colours.  Hit IntelBurnTest (a frontend for Intel Linpack) and prime95, both pass without even getting that warm.  Hit Furmark for the video.  It runs for ever, topping out at 72 degrees.

Everything runs fine!  Launch a YouTube video, Blue screen.  Restart, Blue screen.  Re-Restart, go to the same damn video, no problems.  I can’t reproduce my problems, the lockups are completely random.  Sometimes I can play Portal for three hours and not have a problem.  Other times it locks up when launching MS Paint.

I hate my PC.

I got home and turned TdrLevel back to 3 (video driver reset timer, 3=normal mode).  Now I get video driver restarts instead of blue screens.

It works right in IE but fails in Chrome.  Need to install more browsers at home to test it…

Also dosn’t work in Firefox…

Got it worked out. Forgot to define the units when I told it to move the marker object. Now click on the field, marker shows up, click on the marker, it disappears. Why? WTF am I a scientist?

	document.getElementById("cross").style.left = (posx-+'px');
	document.getElementById("cross").style.top = (posy-+'px');

20 Watts of power!

About 15 years ago I found a “Fender Sidekick Bass” amp in a pawn shop and picked it up. It’s a crappy little solid state amp from the late ’80s, made in Taiwan.  It has a large sound for its size, and has taken a lot of abuse over the years without quitting.  Until recently, I haven’t had a bass that was worth anything, so I’ve never replaced my amp; I have become quite attached to it.  I’ve been going to an acoustic jam once a month since September, and my acoustic bass just doesn’t have enough volume to cut over all the guitars, so it was suggested that I bring an amp.

Now when playing along with electric guitars, I’d just crank the amp up to ten and leave it. However, setting the levels right with a bunch of acoustic guitars is a bit different, and it turns out all the pots on my amp have gotten a bit scratchy over the years, making it nearly impossible for me to set a level that would work between 2 and 3 on the dial. I got to endure a lot of “turn it up, we can’t hear you” and “I can’t hear the singer, turn it down”. Not a good impression to make on a bunch of people I’m just getting to know.

Working on a late ’80s solid state amplifier is like working on a late ’80s minivan. No matter what you do to it, it will never be “good”, and will never be classic. The best my amp will ever be is a late ’80s low power solid state amp.  But my free time is “free time”, and the cheapest comparable bass amp at Long & McQuade is probably the Rumble 15 or 30, for between $100 and $200, so even if it will never sound “good”, fixing it is better than spending $150 on an amp that will also sound like crap.

Not much going on inside

When I opened it up, I remembered that I had “fixed” this amp before. Quite the ball of tape hanging from the input wires.

I don't think those wires passed the QC

The nuts on the input jacks stripped maybe ten years ago when I was working for a friend at his guitar store. We had a dead amp there with the same jack spacing, so I swiped the inputs from it. The Fender amp had a larger circuit board with resistors on it to separate the two input signals, but the replacement didn’t, so I guess I must have found two resistors lying around and just jammed them inline.

I'm not proud

This will have to be remedied.

The entire brain

This is what runs everything. I grabbed the Bipolar Analog Integrated Circuit uPC1188H datasheet to check it out, but I haven’t checked the little board that’s attached to see how it’s used in my amp. It is the same chip amp as the Princeton stereo chorus, and is still used a lot.

More to come, second part is on the way.