Videonics video editing switchers are pretty common but their power supplies are also commonly lost. The connector is a standard 6 pin DIN type and here is the pinout:
Pins 1 and 4: +5vdc (probably regulated) 4.5 amps
Pins 2 and 5: ground
Pin 3: +10vdc 0.4 amp
Pin 6: -10vdc 0.4 amp
I haven’t looked inside the switcher to see if it needs the +/-10v to be regulated voltages. My guess is the +5 needs to be. If I had to homebrew a power solution for one of these I’d probably start with a PC power supply and run the +/- 12 rails through buck converters or LM7810 + LM7910 regulators (my guess is that the load on these channels is pretty minimal).
I got an Alta Cygnus video frame sync/processing amp a while back that didn’t work because the cap from its fuse holder was missing. No big deal, just gotta open it up and change the holder.
Well, somehow this completely escaped me ever photographing the process or what’s inside the unit, but it’s got one hilarious “feature” I have to wonder about.
Simple. Elegant. MADNESS.
So, the chassis of the unit has the motherboard (enormous square monster utterly tessellated in DIP ICs) screwed to the bottom panel. The top cover slides forwards to remove it and it’s one piece, including that very 1980s chamfer.
Do you…. do you already see what that means? If you were expecting it to be cursed, yes, you do…
See all those knobs? Every one of them is a very nice little molded plastic knob with a metal insert that holds it to the control shaft with a small hex screw.
Every one of them has to come off to slide off the cover.
Yeah. Sure. That was a great idea.
It’s the top of the line of utility sports, unexplained fires are a matter for the courts
I mean, once I got past that and replaced the fuse holder it looks like it’s gonna work perfectly fine. But seriously, what on earth?!
These brochure pages are all the documentation I can find on the unit, I’d love to score a manual though as there are a lot of internal adjustments and dip switches I’m curious about. But am I curious enough to have to remove and reinstall all those knobs?!
It’s been way too long since I’ve updated anything here. I’m definitely burned out like one of those terrifying light bulbs and my work environment is really absolute blowage like a poorly balanced 5015 blower hanging off a 3d printer carriage and making the print look absolutely raunchy as its vibration slightly shifts the base of a bridge in the print as the GCode rolls off an M106 S255 to increase airflow. Not that I’d know anything about that. (I wonder if ebm papst makes 5015 size blowers? Their dynamic balancing is TOP NOTCH.) Yeah uh. In the last few weeks we upgraded the brains of our stupid robot camera pedestals and now they’re…. somehow less reliable. Cool.
Meanwhile I experienced a really dumb thing: after one of our new members of the engineering team was telling me about the features of his Prusa 3d printers, I realized I have a couple that were sidelined ages ago due to failures I didn’t really understand how to fix, and… Oops now I have too many working machines
Fun fact: the big delta had been previously, incorrectly assembled by a Tesla engineer and had never successfully printed anything. It works now!
Everyone in the room understood me when I said “oops I accidentally printed a Triscuit”. This is the result of accidentally using a stock ender 3 profile in PrusaSlicer on one of the two direct drive machines up on top here with an all metal hotend, that setup really doesn’t like the 5mm retraction distance! 1mm works fine.
Oops I forgot the bean dip
The Ender 3 is running Klipper now. This one has a Creality 1.1.3 mainboard which I should just replace – it’s fairly awful. The CPU on it doesn’t have enough storage for Marlin to use its latest and greatest bed mesh leveling tricks (the UBL features). That being said it’s also kinda short on pins….. but it isn’t! Note this unused EXT-A2 header in the middle with the capacitor stuffed in it. It goes to pin PA2 / 29 on the CPU. Marlin calls it 29, Klipper calls it PA2. Creality famously never provided schematics for this board so I stabbed it with a Fluke till I found it. I soldered on a header and put the cap back as well.
On a side note be very very careful if you buy a Creality branded Bltouch. Their ribbon cable has the wire colors completely wrong. Go by pin number, DO NOT TRUST THE COLORS. The only reason this atrocious board didn’t blow up from having its +5v rail shorted to ground by the Bltouch cable when I went by color code was that it is simply such a stubborn abomination with its loud ass A4988 stepper drivers that sound like a running toilet that it simply refused to be cleansed from the earth by a mere short circuit. Well that and think it essentially just has a LM7805 on there somewhere.
There’s also this post on Simon’s Tech Blog detailing some more intricate hacking of this board by repurposing an SD card IO line, though not the low hanging fruit there on pin PA2. I’ll be honest, it was kinda me seeking an *easy* place to land the BLTouch control wire that led me to look here.
I mean it about the running toilet noises. It’s kinda obnoxious. I remember my Monoprice mini delta printer* making these sounds too and…. ugh.
* probably a lost cause and it’s been thrown in my bin of crap to trade to a fellow tinkerer for something I actually want. On a side note I started looking at my old Monoprice Select Mini V2 last night and realized maybe I can revive that thing too.. But why? Or why not? Uhhh.
Anyway, now for an assortment of fine balderdash.
“hey, it’s warm in here, I wonder why?”
Thankfully this all just hosed off. This condenser is less than a month old.
Not pictured, sadly: the surprise indoor waterfall that occurred when an air vent valve on the chilled water air handler in one room at work blew up following a chiller failure. Squirt, squirt. 💦💦💦
Suddenly the logo changed on this one screen. I’m pretending not to notice. HhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH After that air conditioning meltdown you bet you’re gonna be able to lure me into a scene live on air with popsicles.
Several times in my adventures working on broadcast transmitter sites, I’ve walked in on a facility absolutely roasting itself to death because the batteries died in a digital HVAC thermostat.
Today was another one of those and it was the strangest. I’m not even going to try to explain what the hell happened because I don’t even know, but I can tell you that apparently, the Maxiva XTE exciters react by just turning everything into a bad game of Numberwang.
In all seriousness though, one exciter developed massive phase noise which led to viewer complaints of not being able to watch the channel, and the other drifted off frequency and wouldn’t go back. I wonder if it’s got packing foam glued over the oscillator like the old Apex?
Another day in paradiseHooking up the GPS antenna along with the external 10 mhz reference… Look at this graph! But alasThis whole thing is uh, never mind, here’s some TCFW.Picture unrelated, but I just love how this looks with translucent circuit boards.
Oh, yes, Mr. Ramko, it occurs to be now that I did realize I’m transgender* that you hold a special distinction in my life:
You are the only person I have ever met who would have had a problem with this …
… and who would say it to me right to my face.
Sir, with all due respect, you suck entire boxes of that Nemal Electronics knockoff of 1855A. My preferred pronouns are they/them but I’m fine with any, except in your case in particular, you may refer to me with silence because I do not want to talk to you. 73’s and good night.
Picture related.
No need for that here. I’m just myself.
Don’t worry, this is being written from a state of bubbly euphoria. I just can’t help but look back on working in such a toxic environment and feeling so glad that I’m free of it. YEEEEET
* specifically somewhere under the nonbinary umbrella. I think maybe agender would describe my feelings, even though I tend towards a more femme style nowadays. I am still just beaming happy that someone just outright guessed this looking at me today. I must have the vibes and stuff 😀
Yeah, I’ve been stuck with this for quite some time now and I have no idea what I’m looking for, other than….
ARCANE MYSTERIOUS WISDOM
and maybe some dark magic
also FIVE TONS OF FLAX
Anyway—
We have a studio camera that’s got a Canon HJ17ex6.2B lens on it. This lens has servos for focus, zoom, and iris. There’s also a small OLED(?) display and menu navigation thing on the hand grip that lets you check and set some options on it.
The bottom of the servo grip has three sockets – one for the remote focus controller, and two for the remote zoom or serial remote controls. The two latter sockets are a 20 pin Hirose connector.
This is supposed to be connected to a Ross Video robotic head’s lens jack for remote operation from the Ross Cambot system.
Originally this was connected to an ancient Vinten robot with a cable that I still have, and connecting it to the lens doesn’t do anything interesting. Connecting Ross’s cable makes the lens go completely and immediately dead with no servo activity, and I have to power cycle the camera or unplug and reconnect the cable between the lens and the camera body to regain any function from it.
The only documentation I have found AT ALL on this 20 pin connector is a kinda weird manual page from Canon, and this diagram from Ross:
And from the Canon manual:
This is from the manual for a ZSD-300 “zoom servo demand” controller. Please note that pin 20 is not shown as to what its function may be. (?!)
And now, the Vinten robot cable… if I look inside the Hirose end of it, it appears to have wires landed only on 13, 15, 16, and 20. 20 and 15 are connected together at the far end of the cable. 19 and 20 are connected together on the Ross cable.
On the Vinten cable three of the four pins on the Lemo connector are used. This suggests to me that whatever pin 20 is— OH WAIT IT’S JUST GROUND, ha, the pins are listed out of order!
I had Ross send me another cable, it has the same pinout and same issue with making the lens power down. I tried another lens of the same model and the same thing happened.
What the heck do I need? I’m throwing this out here in case someone possesses the correct ARCANE KNOWLEDGE.
My best guess: I need to NOT ground pin 19, as it is open circuit on the Vinten cable. The mysterious runes in the Canon doc seem to suggest it might be used to determine whether you’re gonna use serial remote mode or an external control. Also they uh, helpfully, labelled these serial lines A/B X/Y, I dunno. My guess is the Vinten thing was using RS-232 style wiring since it only has three wires coming out (RS-422 and RS-232 can be kinda sorta bodged together with reasonable success).
Yes, anarchist catgirl presenting nonbinary seems like a good description for me.
Bizarre 20 bay FM antenna, I don’t know what they were thinking but it makes for a good meme
So it turns out in addition to bricking themselves, these exciters can also crap out their backup battery. Not sure if I’d call it an improvement over the system in the old Apex M2X as now it’s an unserviceable custom $300 battery pack!?
Anyway let me stop being vexed by stupid transmitters and point out this thing I discovered:
Pink and red eyeshadow do appear to be my absolute jam.
Harmonic Electra X making me mad in several ways nyaa
Hey, I got all the modules for the transmitter repaired, let’s go put them all back in there! First, I’m just gonna switch to the aux and……
*horns.aiff*
I do not know what came out of that transmitter, but it was not proper digital television. It had a carrier, and it had maybe some sort of data, but it wasn’t television. It was FIVE TONS OF FLAX or some shite I dunno.
The GatesAir Maxiva XTE exciters were violently unhappy.
I wish I’d saved a screenshot of the exciter user interface but it really didn’t tell me much other than that where you go in and it will tell you what service PIDs are present in your ASI stream, it just showed what looked like a bunch of line noise. Rebooting the exciter didn’t help. Ugh, software corruption again? Maybe— but I decided to go to GatesAir’s support site and look to see what the latest version of the exciter software was, if I was just gonna be reloading it anyway… and saw that the changelog mentioned a fix to a failure that occurs specifically when you’re feeding them from a Harmonic Electra X… which we are. One awkwardly long software load process later, I have two working exciters on the aux again, and I can continue! I wonder how much packing foam and glue this model contains?
Installing the missing PA modules, then removing, reinstalling them, wiggling them around until they fully make contact (why?!), then reinstalling the modules adjacent to them when they got loose and threw “PA not present” faults got all but two modules up and running— one down with bad power transistors (ANOTHER?!) and one with an “RF Off Warning”.
The one with the “RF Off Warning” was suffering only from a very familiar and ultimately harmless problem—
Let me once again state my eternal love for these MADDENINGLY CURSED D-SUB POWER CONNECTORS where the pins fall out and back into the module. Ye gods… STAGE PIN CONNECTORS would be an improvement over this, and I have a dislike for those things that’s just about palpable. (It helps in that case that I’ve had several of them explode into showers of sparks and smoke in my hands while working on studio lighting.)
Gee, I wonder why the transmitter says PA3 RF OFF WARNING? Yeah, you kinda need power to make RF…
Shoooooomp
Next time remind me to not skip going to get the powered screwdriver to do this, that’s like two bakers’ dozen screws and takes forever to get into.
I swear, there is just no end to the fun with this transmitter. Let this be a lesson to you all, do not defer maintenance for five years while your station is a Shitclair property and let your transmitter cook in 110 degree heat every summer of that because your air conditioners are slowly becoming piles of green rust. Also keep up with your software updates. Also HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH. Plenty of that.
Sony HSC-300 camera… presenting with loss of power and/or signal whenever the swivel spigot on the side is rotated. The part was ordered… $835 and it took two weeks to ship… Yowza. I’m clearly in the wrong business.
And there it is. $835.
At first I was really perplexed wondering how this not even coaxial set of wires carries HD-SDI, but… it’s not necessarily HD-SDI. I’m not really sure what it is. It’s 170vdc power, and some flavor of bidirectional RF something or other that goes to the CCU and also carries prompter and return video to the viewfinder and serial data. Ok then.
The old part was really munched.
All in all not a hard replacement, but damn that parts cost!!! Wow. Well, I don’t have to buy it myself (this isn’t South Florida!) so bite me. Ha.
