[HN Gopher] Diagnosing video signal loss on Wii and GBS-Control
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       Diagnosing video signal loss on Wii and GBS-Control
        
       Author : zdw
       Score  : 54 points
       Date   : 2024-06-12 00:53 UTC (3 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (nyanpasu64.gitlab.io)
 (TXT) w3m dump (nyanpasu64.gitlab.io)
        
       | zdw wrote:
       | The level of debugging involved, all the way to the wallswitch in
       | this was frankly impressive. I doubt most people would have dived
       | that deep into an analog issue.
        
       | Sakos wrote:
       | I know a lot of the words here, but most of it sounds like
       | gibberish. I wish I had the expertise and domain knowledge to be
       | able to do something like this. It was a fantastic read and I'm
       | awed by the author's dedication and level of knowledge.
       | 
       | Unfortunately, as an enterprise software developer, my hardware
       | proficiency stops at being able to assemble PCs and diagnose
       | simple hardware issues (is this power supply broken?) at a very
       | abstract level. I've encountered issues like this before and
       | lacked the expertise to properly diagnose it on a low enough
       | level, which can be frustrating.
        
         | chongli wrote:
         | If you have some free time you could always try taking up
         | electronics as a hobby. Learn about Ohm's law and circuits,
         | KVL/KCL, test equipment such as multimeters and oscilloscopes,
         | alternating current, capacitors and inductors, relationships
         | between frequency and impedance, Smith charts, spectrum
         | analyzers, VNAs, oscillators, digital logic...
         | 
         | Okay it sounds like a lot but if you have an hour or two to
         | study per week you'd be surprised at how much you can learn in
         | just a few years!
        
           | jdietrich wrote:
           | Electronics has the benefit of having one truly definitive
           | textbook.
           | 
           | https://artofelectronics.net/
        
             | chongli wrote:
             | And it has a lab course to go with it!
        
               | atribecalledqst wrote:
               | The lab course is getting harder to run since the parts
               | in the BOM on the author website are being end-of-life'd.
               | I ran into this when I started trying to run it as a
               | self-study project a while ago. It wasn't always clear
               | what parts you could use to replace them either...
               | 
               | Also, the BOM itself doesn't have everything used in the
               | course, so I sometimes found I needed to order something
               | I hadn't anticipated needing. (the frustration with this
               | ultimately caused me to drop it, maybe half-ish of the
               | way through)
               | 
               | This doesn't really negate your point, the lab course
               | certainly still exists, I'm just not sure how amenable it
               | is to run through as a self-study hobbyist.
        
               | chongli wrote:
               | It looks like some others on the eevblog forums have run
               | into the same issues. I found a discussion on putting
               | together a BOM for the second edition here [1].
               | 
               | It seems like it would be a good community project to
               | maintain an updated BOM of available parts for the lab
               | course!
               | 
               | [1] https://www.eevblog.com/forum/beginners/learning-the-
               | art-of-...
        
       | francis_t_catte wrote:
       | it's likely not the dimmer's fault; phase angle triac dimmers
       | were designed when resistive loads (incandescent light bulbs)
       | were king. except for the super-low-wattage-per-lumen type, most
       | LED light bulbs I run across these days are based capacitive
       | dropper power supplies, which are inductive by nature (hence
       | their atrocious power factor). combining that kind of load with
       | phase-angle dimming is a recipe for crazy harmonics many orders
       | of magnitude higher than the 60Hz base frequency.
        
         | dfox wrote:
         | I assume that design based on something like TPS92411 actually
         | ends up being cheaper and more reliable than various series
         | capacitor constructions, while being dimmable just fine and
         | without spewing EMI. So it is just question of the OEMs having
         | one 10 year old design and still using it.
        
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       (page generated 2024-06-15 23:01 UTC)