mothwalk: 9/2/2019

One of the nice things about living in an area that's reasonably forested for 2019 is the abundant supply of caterpillars we get in the fall. I've been sidelined from serious walks, but as I start to get to where I'm both bored enough to want to deal with the breathing complication and willing to tolerate the yoyoing humidity levels from day to day, the rewards are still out there waiting. I didn't take a picture of the one American giant millipede we saw, but here's the moth activity.

 A snowberry clearwing egg

 This stunning hairdo on a rosy maple moth caterpillar

 Bugguide is loading slowly, so I don't know what kind of sphingid this is. Or if it is one.

 I have no idea what these usually-fuzzy chaps are, but this one isn't skipping proleg day.

 A prowling geometer

Again, slow loading pages are preventing me from properly identifying this otherwise neat caterpillar.

I'll have to hit the books when I get home to see if I can figure out what these are, but seeing as how I haven't been able to play real-life pokemon like this in over a month, I actually want to know on a visceral level.

The Legend of The Throwing of the Pickles

I have a pickle problem.

This is a cautionary tale, an entertainment, and a distraction from more depressing issues.

Notably, I love dill pickles and will eat them as snacks, and apparently do not terribly mind eating too many pickle spears. This has resulted in me getting occasional gifts of pickles from catered events at work. Usually it's a bowl with maybe 20 or 30 spears in it and we'll have it last a few days thanks to our refrigerator.

This last time, it was a bit more. It was a catering tray from Jason's Deli with probably five or six pounds of pickles in it.

I started cracking in at it and had killed maybe five or six in the first ten minutes at which point I proclaimed I needed to slow down. Over the next three or four hours, I think I must have had at least 24 or 25 pickle spears. The tray was noticeably diminished in gravity by the time I had run out of energy and needed to head home.

Side note: I was three weeks out from major neck surgery. Still well within the length of time I have been instructed to "begin trying to look left and right more each day."

The pickles needed to go.

Our refrigerators are both mini fridges, more appropriate for a dorm room than an office. They work great for keeping sandwich parts ready, but aren't going to take a full catering tray of leftovers. We also don't have reusable containers around for excess pickles (though, apparently, that may be something we need to add to the list), so to the trash they went. That's fine, they'd been open and out of the cold all day and were starting to get soggy and discolored. I loaded up my stuff and grabbed the pickle tray and headed out the door.

I made it about two thirds of the way down the stairs and my heel caught the landing.

I am fine. I was fine. Somehow, for the first time in my life, my instincts of self-preservation kicked in and I caught myself with both arms on the handrails. I knew I needed to not fall down stairs while I still had glue on my incision.

The pickles took flight.

Flash forward: I collected my thoughts and went to the hallway phone. The one intended for people having problems in classrooms to use for getting help. It didn't work. A ringtone, it takes key inputs, but no ring. So I fished my phone out of my pocket, still with tinge of pickle juice on my fingers, and called up stairs. "Hey. Yeah. Hey can you meet me downstairs by the dean's office with two rolls of paper towels? .... Yeah, the pickles. .... I fell down the stairs. ... yeah I'm okay."

I didn't just drop the tray, I threw it forward and away from me.

It made sense, I needed to get my left arm out to the side to catch the railing before I fell far enough that the nerve damage I had at the time kept me from being able to reach high enough to grab it.

Correspondingly, there were pickles, pickle juice, and seeds <em>everywhere</em> on the last five steps of the flight and within about a six foot radius of the bottom. We got it cleaned up pretty well; the stairwell vaguely smelled of pickles that afternoon and the next morning, but it was fine by the next afternoon. The pickles all hit the floor. There were no survivors.

Personally, I learned a lesson: never look a gift tray of pickles in the mouth, or anywhere. Don't accept gift trays of pickles. Make sure they're in jars.

Cleaned out

I lost nearly 300 posts to dead links and broken photos, but I think I'm good to go forward now. Like I mentioned last post, I will try to revisit my Lightroom library and post some random shots from over the years, and I might also consider rolling phone photography into that just for comparison of "I wanted to take photos" and "I needed to document this with a picture!" They're different mindsets for me, for the most part... or at least they used to be, when phone cameras were garbage.

Also, a fun exercise in how my life's changed or not: I have apparently had problems sleeping for years. As far back as the beginning of this experiment, I'd have timestamps of between midnight and 4am on a pretty regular basis. I also have gotten a lot out of the time I spent in therapy, as I don't get mad at nothing anymore.

A return to the written word

After two and a half years of no activity on this platform*, I've decided I'm going to try to start writing again with some regularity and purpose. During the intervening months, I have neglected comment moderation, content production, and purpose of blog. I also have lost track of the photography aspect of this blog, which means most of the old pictures I've taken and posted over the years are lost to whatever hosting they had previously lived on; I'll end up deleting those posts, which will take me a while to sort through. That's a bit of a bummer, but it does create a neat opportunity to start revisiting the last 13 years of digital photo archives and occasionally posting a look back and giving me the opportunity to ruminate on the circumstances of individual photos in ways I would not have otherwise done.

Blessings in disguise and all that.

So what's ahead? 

First, I have to post the diagnostics and analysis I did for my Ampeg SVT-III Pro (1995 model, hence III instead of 3) and what I ended up doing to repair it. I need to post some thoughts on the 5F1 "clone" I made. I have to talk about the repairs I did on the Tektronix 317 oscilloscope I repaired back in 2018, and the Tek 465 I got and refurbished before that. I will probably have a little bit to talk about the Tek 2336 I had for a while, because it was fun and because I had to commission some 3D printed latch parts to get it to stay closed.

I also have had a LOT of health experience and can write your eyes out with thoughts about dealing with thyroid cancer for six nonstop years.

I'm going to largely stay away from politics, but I may have to write some things on current events involving people who look like me doing reprehensible, racist things.

I may have thoughts and observations about biology. I probably will have thoughts about climate. I love some of the biodiversity we have around here and will be sad to see it go when climate change comes to reclaim the earth from us. I really do like spending time outside and watching the butterflies and moths, and then it's on when it's millipede season here.

Finally, you may also end up getting some thoughts on music, music production, and my limited understanding of music theory. It's what I end up doing a lot of ongoing learning about, so here we are: an outlet.

You may be wondering "why?" if you're reading this. I am currently dealing with a complication from surgery that's left me without much of a voice. It's not as bad as it was when this last happened in 2013, but I still find myself yearning to produce "new" thought and information. Hopefully, a keyboard will work to scratch that itch, as posting to blogger is a lot cheaper than buying a ton of music hardware and writing music nobody will listen to because most people seem to dislike tracks without lyrics. I'm sure not in a place I can sing right now, so saving money it is. So, with that, I'm back.

* - There's a reason I called this place "the content vortex" and it has everything to do with my personal history of forgetting to update it or pay attention to it for months at a time. I just usually do better than two and a half years.

Repairing an Ampeg PF-500 part 2

I was able to install the IRS20957 IC and the amplifier did in fact come back to life! Unfortunately, after some length of time playing at high volumes, it cuts out - first intermittently with some static, then with a loud snap. A brief cool-down brings it back again, though. I wonder if it's not some of the other power supply-related components that are failing intermittently. I would need to run it hard for a while, then leave it on after cut out for a bit to see if it cools down and starts working again. If that's the case, my guess would be the power supply's MOSFETs might have suffered over-current, or I guess it could be that I did a bad job joining the 4227s to their heat sink. At this point, I have everything I need (including know-how) to quickly get into the output section and can do the supply section pretty quickly, too, so I'm not exactly lost in the woods.

I still have that replacement main PCB on order, too...

Updates coming as they are available! I'm working on a Champ 5F1 clone in the mean time.

Repairing an Ampeg PF-500

I recently got the urge to buy a backup or easy travel bass amplifier so I didn't have to lug around my whole rack kit if I wanted to jam loud. I found a broken Ampeg Portaflex PF-500 on eBay and figured I could probably fix it, or at the very least, get hold of the replacement parts from an Ampeg service center. The following is the adventure:

The amp arrived with one of the two IRFB4227 power transistor cut out of the board and the holes for it desoldered. I ordered a few of that replacement as well as some of the main switch-mode power supply transistors and the main bridge rectifier, just in case. Some folks on forums like talkbass have suggested that the IRFB4127 could be used in place of the 4227, as it has higher RMS and peak current specs, but the turn-off delay is longer by quite a bit. Either way, the replacement transistors arrived and I set about replacing the known-bad one and figured I'd go ahead and desolder the other one while I was in there.

This is not a good picture of the power MOSFETs on the far left side of the chassis. They're a bit of a pain to get to in situ, so the easiest way to deal with it turns out to be trying to loosen the hold-down bracket and removing the heat sink. That may require removing the big heat-shrinked capacitor right in front of the middle screw; the amp came for me without the middle screw in place, so I don't know how the PO or his service tech dealt with that problem, as it also didn't look as though the cap had ever been desoldered. Maybe needle-nose pliers? An about 5mm deep 90-degree PH1 bit? I don't know.

Here's a shot of the switch-mode MOSFETs. The bridge rectifier is behind that. These are hard to get to for unscrewing, but a 10mm right-angle driver should be fine. These are actually working well in my board; the power amp disaster did not affect the power supply's outputs.

Worth noting - my transistor tester reported that the still-installed output MOSFET was still good! I'm not sure how that happened, but I saved the part just in case.

After installing the new parts, the amp powered on and passed its self-test. No sound output, though. Next step came testing to make sure the power supply was actually working. I got a case of the apprentice shakes and blew out both replacement output MOSFETs and let the smoke out of one of the diodes nearby.

That little dude right there is what died. Nobody around here has SMD parts like that in stock, so another order to Mouser. ER1D diodes are reasonably close to 1N4004s, so I bodged one in to continue testing while the correct part is on its way. I also swapped back in the one known-good 4227 and the one remaining new 4227, and got back out of fault land into an amp that just doesn't work right. At this point, I plugged headphones in and was surprised to hear my bass coming through them! So now at least I knew that the input board was not totally dead, the power supply was good, and both of my output MOSFETs were good.

Next came testing the output board. The red wires are the outputs from the power section, and the blue wires are the returns to ground. A simple check with a multimeter made plenty of beeps across, and hooking up a signal generator and oscilloscope revealed a good clear signal transmission. Okay, so now we know the input board is good and the output board (at least as far as the power amp was concerned) is good.

Next comes trying to trace the signal through the head. I did NOT feel like trying to tear out the input board, so I started at the beginning of the main board.

Into the input on a hacked-together speaker cable test rig was a 2kHz 0.2V sine wave. Whatever happens to that in the input board, it comes out on pin 7 of that connector. On goes the oscilloscope and hey! 2kHz on pin 7. Great, so the problem is now isolated specifically to the audio section of the main board. I turned off the amplifier and checked continuity from the big resistor next to the big toroidal inductor (L7, obscured under hot snot) near the output jumper (visible in both of the previous pictures on the bottom edges of each). I had continuity from there to the output jacks, so at least I knew that the traces were intact. Next came oscilloscoping at each marked test point on the main board schematic.
Input of C33: couldn't find it.
Pin 7 of U18: success! 2kHz right there.
Pin 1 of U18: 2kHz once again.
Output of L7: a small DC voltage offfset. No sine wave.

Okay great, that's a big swath of components that could have failed, but at least the two dual op-amps were good. In reviewing the schematic for potential test points, I noticed that there is only one more place that the signal actually passes through on its way to the output MOSFETs, and that's an IRS20957 audio IC.

I can't tell for sure that the IC under that "heat sink" is U1, but it looks to have the right number of pins to be the part.

That's where this repair job is right at the moment. I suspect that people who have PF-500 heads that have sound that "cuts out" but no fault light to go along with it are probably dealing with this IRS20957 IC failing intermittently. What's interesting about this amplifier's self testing is that it isn't failing on whatever is broken in that chip, at least not consistently. About half the time I had my bodged test lead connected to either the main instrument input, the preamp output, or the power amp input, the amp would fail to start. I never had any problems with it starting without the test plug inserted, and the preamp board was clearly okay with the 0.2V input amplitude, as it passed it undistorted to both the main board pin 7 input and the tuner out jack on the output board. Is it possible it was faulting because of additional load on the IRS20957? Who knows. I do know that that heat sink is hilarious. I also know that, at least according to the product example picture at Full Compass, the revision J board (mine is a revision C) doesn't even have a heat sink on U1.

I ordered a replacement IRS20957 and a few more IRFB4227s just in case I pooch up this board again in testing. The solder pads for the outputs are getting very tired, and the last time I tried to do a SMD (installing a pair of THS3092 opamp ICs into an MHS-5200A signal generator in place of the AD812s that came in it), I managed to destroy three of the sixteen traces on the board and had to do some very careful scrape-and-bodge work on the board; thus, I don't have a whole lot of faith in getting to where I can call this rev C board a finished, working, and perhaps most importantly, reliable project. Fortunately, that Full Compass link up there exists, so I have a (hopefully rev J) replacement main board on order to put in once I've finished screwing up the one currently installed.

I think this'll be a nice amplifier once it's done. It has a speakon output which should prevent future short-circuit damage while plugging or unplugging the speakers, and the rest of the device is in really good shape. I plan on giving it a good workout and comparison to my SVT-3PRO once the servicing mission is complete. In the meantime, I wait patiently for some delivery person to bring me a box of lil' black boxes...

Not photos - problems with Windows Backup

On Friday, my Windows 8.1 PC began giving me errors about "bad image" for a file called wtsapi32.dll. So began my adventure down "oh where are my backup folders?" and "I hope this lasts long enough to get my user directory copied over." It did, and a windows refresh largely fixed my problems, much to the chagrin of the router, which needed to serve my steam library, creative cloud applications, and various other archives and executable installers.

That didn't quite fix my problems - my main drive kept reporting errors through the Windows action center, so I set about trying to fix that. That's when I noticed BIOS taking forever to finish POST. I cleared to defaults with no benefit, then had the bright idea to flash back to an older version. At some point, though, Asus made it so that the flash utility won't go backward. I had to then dig up instructions for USB BIOS flashback, which included "make sure the CPU and memory are unseated."

Yeah okay.

PROTIP #1 - Asus USB BIOS flashback does *not* require a bare motherboard for my specific combination of Z97-PRO/4790K/2x4GB Crucial Ballistix Sport/2x8GB Crucial Ballistix sport. I would imagine this is true for other Z97 and X99 boards (the X99 instructions don't mention removing components, while the Z97 instructions did).

So now with the 1304 BIOS reflashed, CMOS cleared, and things reconfigured, the computer stopped complaining. On to the backup problems.

When trying to use the system image backup option in Windows 8.1 pro, I would get started down the path and get an error about either the drive being unavailable or inaccessible. Neither of those things were true; I was able to copy hundreds of gigabytes over eSATA, Firewire 800, and USB2.0. After a lot of searching on errors 0x807800C5, 0x80780081, and 0x8078004F, I found a post at answers.microsoft.com (click here if you want it) that went through some stuff, then someone mentioned EFI system partitions and Mac OS. 

Bingo.

Infosphere, my external backup drive, had been used previously on Mac OS X as a time machine drive. I don't know if that specifically causes the problems, but I do know Windows tends not to like drives with 200MB EFI partitions very much, as I had a bunch of flash drives that I had to gparted back to life after I jumped ship last summer. I didn't think there was any problem with the external HDD, though, as it had functioned just fine and I even remember it having worked as a system image backup destination before. That may have been something changed in an update at some point, but I think what is more likely is that I don't have Paragon HFS+ drivers installed right now. Regardless, I was able to use diskpart to nuke the existing NTFS and EFI system partitions and create a new single partition setup that immediately accepted a system image backup.

      THE OPERATION WAS

COMPLETED SUCCESSFULLY.

         CLEAR TIME 16:50

PROTIP #2 - always nuke your drives fully when changing platforms. I was up until 3am last night working on this and I'm fleshing out this post at 1am, having finished up downstairs about an hour ago. gparted, diskpart, doesn't matter - get rid of that stupid EFI partition on any disk upon which it has inserted itself.

PROTIP #3 - I have no factual evidence to base this one on, but all of my trouble started when I used Windows Movie Maker to produce video game footage. Learn premiere pro instead if you have CC.