Fluorescent Lamp Starter – Diassembly September 22, 2009
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Curious what’s inside a fluroescent lamp starter?
The one in my arcade cabinet was burnt out, so after I replaced it I decided to take it apart.
What it looks like:
Bend the tabs outwards:
Contents:
Overall it looks quite simple. It seems to be a bulb and another circuit element (no idea what it is exactly and I’m too lazy to look it up) wired in parallel.
JPac, DIY MAME Cabinets, MAME Emulator — some tips September 20, 2009
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The cabinet is still not working quite right, but here’s a few bits of info I discovered to be helpful.
J-PAC: This board emulates a keyboard and oddly enough it has been having problems trying to emulate it on the PS/2 port, and the keyboard pass through doesn’t work. I haven’t contacted the guys at Ultimarc but I learned that it is MUCH better to use the USB option instead. Unfortunately this requires me to reinstall my OS as I had managed to somehow mess up that feature (usb keyboard), but I tested it on my personal desktop and it works fantastic. Plus this lets you plug your keyboard directly into the computer, which is REALLY needed during the debug phase.
Arcade Monitors: I set mine to low-res and put the computer to metal slug’s resolution of 320×240, or something close to that. It works until I enable soft15khz to force 15khz output, which changes the resolution, which doesn’t fit on the monitor. No tried solution yet but if you go to their website, you can learn how to write a simple text file to disable resolutions which don’t work on your arcade monitor.
Windows XP: I tried to hack mine down with nLite, bad plan. Just do the typical install with the windows CD. Although this means more RAM eaten, it ensures the least amount of problems. Plus RAM is cheap nowadays.
More later, as always.
Toyota 15 amp taillight converter – auto circuit protect September 2, 2009
Posted by noodleknight in Repairs.add a comment
This was a bit of useful information that was sort of difficult to find.
When I first bought the trailer it had a smashed up driver side light module. This module actually caused a horrible short in the trailer electric system which ended up in blowing the fuse for my rear brake lights. I’ve fixed this and the car has no problems anymore, but after fixing the trailer lighting system I noticed I only had one functional light, and it would only turn on when signaling or braking, the rest of the lights didn’t work. I chocked this up to still messed up electrics but ultimately it turned out that the taillight converter in my tow vehicle was shot.
This happens to be a very common thing for the later model Toyota and Lexus vehicles with the 4 pin tow package installed (tail, brake, signal lights only). The old “15 amp taillight converter” with “auto circuit protect” would often fail. I’m pretty sure I fried mine which was the cause of it’s death but apparently others with the similar tow vehicle have had theirs die under normal operation. I also question the auto-circuit protect feature because I managed to burn out the fuse for the brake lights… I wish I could find a module in a junkyard and cut it open to examine the contents to see if it’s somewhat serviceable.
What’s the solution? These taillight converters come in a black factory sealed box, so simply opening them up and fixing them is not an easy task. I have yet to call a Lexus dealer but last I heard they are not in production/sold out/whatever. I do believe they are in stock, just a newer version, but they are probably expensive. Someone was quoted $180 for the module and harness (they are one piece). So in my opinion, the best a person can do is purchase an aftermarket replacement; the ones on eBay come with the factory plugs which will fit into the harness. Assuming they have the circuit protection (which is a MUST in my opinion) this is what I will probably do until I can figure out how to repair the factory module (which I doubt will happen).
Jpac troubles August 30, 2009
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This is becoming more difficult that I had wished, but since a lot of this stuff was donated/given to me, I will accept the fact that the project will require a lot of debug. The cabinet has been taking most of my time to prepare and now it’s more or less functional. Oddly enough, I thought the power supply wasn’t working because the fan did not turn on. I am going to guess the fan is dead because the monitor certainly turns on. Also the fluorescent light that lights up the marquee does not work, I haven’t quite debugged whether or not it is the ballast or starter that is malfunctioning (or maybe both) but that’s a lesser priority.
One of my electrical engineer friends came over today and since it was too hot to work outside on other projects (105*F), we decided to try and get the rest of the cabinets electrics working.
Enter the J-pac by Ultimarc. This is quite a well built circuit piece. Basically it interfaces with the standard JAMMA plug and lets you connect a variety of your own switches, as well as connect it to your computer and let it exchange data through the keyboard port and VGA port.
But that’s where the problems start. First the computer, for the longest of all time, did not want to boot up. A bit of fiddling with plugs and the CMOS battery did the trick and now it is running consistent. I had installed the OS and emulators but unfortunately the emulators ran quite slow. Although it uses a 2.0GHz Pentium 4, the 256MB of RAM coupled with on-board audio and video really slowed it down.
Here is the first fix/bit of important information. MAME being an emulator has to emulate all the hardware which taxes the processor quite a lot. The BEST solution to this is to AVOID onboard graphics, as in get a graphics card. I used a GeForce 2 MMX 440 and it ran fantastic; this graphics card is 9 years old and has only 32MB of RAM, so as you can see it does not take much. If you’re in a real pickle you should downgrade MAME as far as you can while still being able to play the ROMs of your choice. Worst comes to worst toggle frame skip (F8 or F9)
Now my next big problem is the fact that the video doesn’t quite work. After using software tricks to make the video card run at 15kHz I’m led to believe that the monitor is in a 25kHz medium resolution mode. I can’t quite find any detailed information but it seems that a video resolution of 640×480 and 16-bit color help the situation. More info later, hopefully.
First reloaded bullet August 15, 2009
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Took some of this stuff:
Then made one of these:
First one too! It’s a .303 British round for my Enfield rifle. 39.9 grains IMR-4064 smokeless powder + Sierra 150gr soft point + Winchester large rifle primer and new brass. I did accidentally push the bullet in too far, but luckily I had a kinetic bullet puller, which was sort of freaky to use. Basically to use it, you have to clamp the bullet inside the hammer then hit the hammer against a hard surface… something about hammering a bullet into a hard surface feels unsafe (but in reality it’s quite safe). The overall length was 2.975″ and I pulled it out to 3.006″, with a few careful presses I got it to 2.973″ which is way close enough for me, especially when the manual said the tolerance was +/- 0.005″
Time to shoot it and see how it goes, I loaded the lightest load in the book so hopefully it doesn’t kick like the 180grain mil-surp I’ve been shooting in the past.
EDIT: Shot 5 rounds of the 180 grain not mil-surp, but factory new ammo. Compared to the 150 grain I reloaded, there was almost no difference, which was interesting. I talked to the range officer on duty that day and I think that the differences in bullet weight and powder load weren’t great enough to have a significant difference when firing, oh well. I’ll take what I can get, it shot out of the rifle and it hit paper (not sure where because when I did look through my spotting scope, I had already peppered the target). I was more excited to be able to shoot the enfield again so I pulled the trigger when I felt like it, rather than when I felt like it would hit on black. I did get a bullseye but I’m going to attribute that to a lot of luck, the rest were sprinkled all over the paper, and one of them landed way outside of the paper. I can see why hand-reloading ammunition can be addicting.
I’ll tell you what… July 25, 2009
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hacking existing code for web apps sucks.
On a project related note, more work is getting done on the arcade machine, maybe it’ll really be done before the end of summer… that would be an accomplishment. At that point i’ll probably attempt a write up and realize that maybe it’s fruitless and i’ll just post about playing it…
Summer…….. June 23, 2009
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Well now that I have sort of settled down (for only about a week) from all the post-school stuff I had to take care of, I can finish up fixing my trusty ol’ station wagon. Except well I have no money, bummer. Fortunately that’s coming in slowly but surely.
So for now, I’m going to tackle the slow and laborious process of cleaning stuff up, starting with the transmission. There are a handful of modifications that I’m planning to do that require next to no money, I suppose I’ll write about those later.
With my small server running for a few months by now I think I can finish up the part 2 of my poorly written DIY, or maybe just rewrite it into something nicer. The machine works quite well, I am very pleased, and it seems to manage memory much better than my linux server which somehow had an odd memory leak.
