"Travis S. Taylor - The Quantum Connection" - читать интересную книгу автора (Taylor Travis S)

screen.
"Hi, Robert." I cursed other things under my breath at him, but smiled on the surface. I was seven
years his senior for damn's sake. "Anything new this morning?" I settled in to my morning caffeine and
sugar fix and surveyed my workbench.
"Yeah, have you seen this yet?" he asked.
"Seen what?"
"A huge meteor has impacted Neptune and astronomers had no idea that it was coming." He pointed
to the screen and there was a James Webb Space Telescope image of the planet Neptune with a huge
impact plume flowing upward from the planet.
"Do they think we're in any danger?" I was beginning to feel nervous.
"Nah, don't worry about it. They're saying that it's way out of our orbit and we have nothing to fear."
Robert turned back to the television, "It looks neat though."
"I guess. Good thing we're safe. So, anything new with work stuff?"
"Oh, yeah, this guy came in last night just before closing with this ancient console game. He said it
wouldn't work and that he needed it fixed by three weeks from tomorrow, oh, I guess that would be
three weeks from today. He also said to call him if it was going to cost more than three hundred dollars."
Robert pointed at a box full of console, controllers, cables, and a few compact disks. "It's in that box.
I've never seen one of those things before, it must be thirty years old."
I looked into the box and saw a game system that they quit making in the late nineties. That's right,
last millennium. I whistled. "Man, they sure don't make 'em like this anymore." I swiped off a space on
my workbench, scratched my stomach reflexively, and then emptied the box out onto the bench in front
of me. "First things first," I said to it. "Let's plug you up and see what happens."
After fiddling with the ancient video game console for about fifteen minutes it was obvious that no
power was getting to any of the output cables. No video signal was produced, no voltages on the
controller ports, and no signals at the memory card slot. The disk didn't spin and the light wouldn't come
on either. The thing was as old as I was; I laughed about that. Laughing was good. I didn't do enough of
it, anymore.
"The power supply is bad, at least," I said. You have to talk to yourself when you are working on
stuff.
I started with the basic six steps for repair of a game console power supply. Even ancient ones must
abide by the repair rules. Simple electronics basics:

1) Open up the game console (this may require a screwdriver, star wrench, or allen wrench).
2) Get out your multimeter (make sure you have good batteries in it) and check all fuses. Replace any
bad ones.
3) Plug in your game console, being careful not to touch any open component connections.
4) Check the voltages everywhere first to see where it stops. If there is no power leaving the power
supply then that's a good sign the power supply unit is bad.
5) Search through the Framework for hours to find the voltage test points and proper voltages for the
particular game system.
6) Since you've proven that the power supply unit is bad, you have to measure the test point voltages
to see where there is something wrong in the power supply.

There it was on about the third or fourth point I tested. I got the wrong voltage. Instead of forty-five
volts A.C., I got thirteen, so I backed up from that point and found a shorted capacitor. I de-soldered it
and replaced it. Then the test voltage read twenty-three volts A.C., so something was still not right. After
further inspection I realized that I had read the capacitor wrong and put the wrong-sized capacitor back
into the board. So, I de-soldered that cap and replaced it. Bingo, forty-five volts!
Excitement. There's another emotion I hadn't had much of lately.
I repeated the six steps again and found that I now had a good and working power supply unit in the