Tag Archives: analogue

Sony WM-D6C Walkman Pro DC-DC converter repair

Good accuracy from a low cost Real Time Clock

One product I work on has a built-in data logger. This helps us a lot if a problem occurs: we can see the history of any faults. Every log entry is time stamped, which is important. We need to know when it’s been used and how often. However, good timekeeping is a challenge. The product has no Internet connection, it gets stored and moved around a lot, and it’s nobody’s job to check or adjust its clock, so there’s a real problem with clock accuracy.

The real time clock is based on the Microchip MCP7940N chip. The chip uses a standard 32.768kHz crystal for its timekeeping. These crystals are fickle beasts, partly because of the very low-power oscillator in the chip. The oscillator frequency, which is critical for accurate timekeeping, is very dependent on the load capacitance, which itself can vary with different builds of the PCB. The heat of soldering during manufacture also affects the crystal. I’ve seen plenty which have failed altogether, and others whose frequency has shifted significantly. Note the soldering on the crystal’s load capacitors C9 and C10 in the photo below, part of an attempt to find the optimum load capacitance on a prototype board.

All of these issues mean that just assembling the PCB and hoping for the best doesn’t work well. The frequency of an apparently working crystal can be anything up to 100ppm (parts per million) wrong. That doesn’t sound like much, but it works out to nearly an hour’s error per year, which is pretty bad.

Fortunately the MCP7940N has a neat feature which helps a lot. One of its registers, called CAL, holds a value which speeds up or slows down the clock by a small amount, like the regulator on a mechanical clock. But how do we know what the error is, and whether it’s been successfully corrected?

The MCP7940N also has a pin which can output a 1Hz square wave derived from the oscillator. With a sufficiently accurate timer, it’s possible to measure the error in the crystal’s frequency this way.

Checking the correction is more difficult. Because the chip only works on whole oscillator clock cycles, it does the adjustment to the clock’s speed by adding or removing a few clock cycles each minute. It’s therefore necessary to measure the period of exactly 60 of the chip’s seconds to find out how long its minute is, and therefore how accurate the whole clock is.

Getting a sufficiently accurate timer is the first problem. My aim was to get the MCP7940N to be accurate to within 1ppm, or about 30 seconds per year. A useful rule of thumb in metrology is that the measuring instrument needs to be ten times more precise that the quantity being measured, so we need a timer accurate to 0.1ppm, or one part in ten million. To the rescue comes my trusty Hewlett Packard 5335A universal counter. It’s an oldie but a goodie. Mine is fitted with the optional oven-controlled crystal oscillator, an HP 10544A. I checked it and set it up against a Rubidium frequency standard about 8 years ago and it hasn’t been touched since. I checked it this month against the same frequency standard, and it still agrees to within 0.1ppm. Not bad, and certainly good enough for this job.

Measuring the initial clock error is easy enough: connect the counter to the MCP7940N’s 1Hz output and look at the error. The 5335A counter has handy built-in maths functions to make this easier, so it will directly display the difference between its idea of a second and the chip’s attempt.

To measure the corrected clock output over a minute needs a bit more trickery. The 5335A counter has an external ‘arm’ input, and can average a period reading over the length of the ‘arm’ signal. All that’s needed is to arm the counter for 60 seconds and the counter will do the rest. I couldn’t find a way to make the counter do this for itself, so I cheated and used a spare Arduino mini that happened to be lying around. All it had to do was wait for a clock pulse on a GPIO pin, take another GPIO pin high to arm the counter, count 60 clock pulses, then take the arm signal low. Simple.

The test setup looked like this. The scope is there for ease of probing (note the cable from its ‘sig out’ connector to the counter) and it also includes a Tektronix 7D15 timer/counter module connected to the chip’s output. The 7D15 is a lot less accurate (about 1ppm) than the 5335A but it’s good enough to give an idea of what correction is required. The Arduino mini is just about visible at the bottom of the photo.

Here’s a closeup of the scope screen, showing the measured period of the clock’s 1Hz output, 999.9818ms. That’s just over 18ppm too fast.

This the setup screen of the product, showing the 18ppm correction applied to the MCP7940N’s CAL register.

Finally the error in the measured minute, calculated by the 5335A counter gated by the Arduino.

It’s showing that the corrected minute is 301.3 parts per billion, so 0.3ppm, too fast. That’s as good as it’s going to get – about 10 seconds per year. With the clock set up using this process, it has a fighting chance of staying accurate in the real world.

That syncing feeling: classic arcade games that won’t stay still

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I’ve got a collection of classic arcade games from the ‘golden era’ of the early 1980s. They’re not the whole wooden cabinets with flickering lights and cigarette burns, but just the circuit boards from inside. They are easy to store and easy to plug in to a joystick and monitor to play.

However, some of them have always been a bit tricky to see. The monitor I use, a spiffy Microvitec bought surplus from Display Electronics in 1990, has fantastic picture quality but is a bit fussy about its input signal. Specifically, it seems to expect that the sync pulses – the bits of the signal which indicate where lines and pictures start – must conform more-or-less closely to broadcast standards. Unfortunately, the people who designed the old video games weren’t too worried about complying with standards. The result is that, on my monitor, some games tend to flicker and roll, or require very finnicky adjustment of the controls.

There’s loads of information about what video sync pulses are supposed to look like on the web. This link has plenty of detail. However, the important things here turned out to be that the horizontal sync pulses should be fairly close to 4.7 microseconds long, and the vertical sync pulses should be pretty much three lines, or 192 microseconds, long.

I compared the outputs of various games – one which had never given problems (Mr Do’s Castle) with three which were troublesome (Phoenix, Pleiads and Q*Bert). The results were interesting. Here’s the vertical sync period from Mr Do’s Castle:

In all the scope pictures, the red trace is the sync output from the game, and the blue line is the vertical sync from my electronics which I’m just using to trigger the scope at the right time.

In this case, the narrow red pulses are the horizontal sync pulses, and the broad area between the dotted lines is the vertical sync pulse. It’s six lines, or about 386 microseconds, wide, which seems to be good enough to keep the monitor happy.

Examining Pleiads and Phoenix, which have the same video electronics, here’s the horizontal sync pulse:

Oh dear, It’s only 3 microseconds wide when it ought to be 4.7. And the vertical sync pulse?

It’s a full eight lines wide, or more than 500 microseconds. Those numbers are way off what the monitor is expecting. The result is that the monitor refuses to give a stable picture, which makes playing the game very tricky:

Looking at Q*Bert, its horizontal sync pulses are nearly three times as wide as they should be, at 12.6 microseconds:

and Q*Bert’s vertical sync pulse looks like this:

It lasts more than a millisecond! That’s miles off. The effect on the picture looks like this:

That’s as stable as I could get it. Notice how the left hand side (which is actually the top – the monitor is rotated 90 degrees) is curved and wobbly. It was fairly hard to adjust the monitor to get the picture stable enough to take a photo.

There are solutions to these problems which involve modifying the game boards themselves, but I didn’t want to do that. I think they’re interesting historical artefacts (even the bootleg ones) and I try to keep them as original as possible. I wanted to fix the sync problems outside the board.

After a bit of experimenting, I came up with a little circuit which regenerates the sync pulses to be a bit more standard.

Untangling the rat’s-nest of wires, the schematic diagram looks like this:

The circuit is simple and cheap, using two standard TTL logic ICs. It ought to work with 74HC series chips as well, but some of the resistor values might need changing. The diode is any common-or-garden signal diode: a 1N4148 or 1N914 is fine. It works like this.

IC1B is a monostable which triggers on every sync pulse, generating a pulse 4.7 microseconds long. These become the new horizontal sync pulses.
IC2B combined with D1, R3 and C3 form a sync separator which triggers the monostable in IC1C only on sync pulses which are longer than about 40 microseconds.
IC1C is a monostable which generates vertical sync pulses about 200 microseconds long.
IC2E combines the new horizontal and vertical sync pulses into a new sync signal.

The output isn’t what you might call broadcast standard, but it’s close enough to make the monitor happy. I’ve tried it on a few games and it works even on games which the monitor was happy with before. Here’s the results from Pleiads:

Nice horizontal sync pulses, with a vertical pulse 193 microseconds long. There are a few extra pulses around but the monitor doesn’t seem to mind.

The results from Q*Bert are also good, though the vertical sync looks even more odd:

The vertical sync pulse is a sensible length, but there’s a long pause after it before the horizontal pulses start again. That doesn’t bother the monitor, though, and all the wobbles have gone away. Here’s the test setup in use.

Sorry about the mess, but at least the display on the monitor is tidy. Mission accomplished.

Repairing a floppy disc drive

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Why on earth would anyone want to repair a floppy disc drive? It’s quite a while since most of us bade them good riddance and started using USB sticks and Flash memory cards. However, I still use floppies from time to time, mostly with my trusty BBC Micro which still sits in the corner of the workshop.

Recently I was asked to recover some documents from some old 5.25″ BBC Micro floppy discs. The documents themselves were in an unusual format, about which more another time, but the first step was to simply get the data off the discs. The discs were 80-track ones, and I have a pair of Chinon FZ-506 80-track drives for the Beeb.

Out of all the various Beeb drives I’ve had over the years, I’ve kept these two because they’re housed in a compact casing with a mains power supply, and they have handy 40/80 track switches on the front, not hidden round the back. One drive has always been a bit reluctant to start spinning, but for occasional workshop use that wasn’t a problem. I’d got in to the habit of just opening and shutting the door a little which would kick the motor into action. However, when it came to intensive use backing up these old discs, which needed both drives, the failure to start became a real pain. I didn’t have a spare drive, and finding another one (especially in Poland) isn’t easy these days.

My curiosity got the better of me and I decided to open up the drive and find out what was wrong with it. It wasn’t hard to take apart and I soon had the motor revealed. Here’s a photo of it sliced into its component parts.

It’s a ‘pancake’ motor, so called because it’s (nearly) flat. The shiny silver bit on the left is the turntable which drives the disc, and it sits in a bearing. The next layer is the circuit board containing the windings and controller circuitry, and below that is the rotor which is a multi-pole magnet on a steel disc.

The motor is controlled by a Mitsubishi M51785P motor controller chip. The chip’s data sheet revealed that the motor has three phases, each of which has a coil to drive the rotor round and a hall effect sensor for feedback. This particular one is arranged with two coils per phase, but occupying 6/7 of a revolution, so the motor goes more slowly than the chip is driving it. At least, I think that’s what’s going on. Here’s a closeup of the circuit board. You can see the six coils, and the coloured wires I soldered on to measure things while the motor was running. Because of the way it’s built, it’s impossible to access most of the circuit board while the motor is assembled.

The controller chip seemed to be doing all the right things: its oscillator was running, and the outputs to the coils were doing sensible things. The coils themselves were all undamaged and measured the same resistance as each other. But I noticed something odd about the hall effect sensors. There are three of them, HG1, HG2 and HG3. I noticed accidentally that if I shorted together the two wires taking the output of HG1 to the controller, the motor still ran but sounded very rough. Not surprising. The same happened if I shorted the output from HG3. But shorting the output from HG2 had no effect at all. Aha! Only HG1 and HG3 seemed to be having any effect on the motor. I swapped HG1 and HG2 just to see what would happen, and the fault moved to HG1. That proved to me that I had a faulty sensor, not a faulty chip.

Where to get a replacement sensor, though? This drive was made some time in the late 1980s, and I couldn’t find hall effect sensors in today’s electronics catalogues which would fit mechanically and electrically. I had a rummage around the workshop and found a scrap 3.5″ floppy drive. A squint at the circuit board revealed a suspiciously hall-effect-looking device of the right shape and size nestled next to the spindle rotor, used for index sensing. Well, it had to be worth a try. I extracted it and fitted it to the 5.25″ drive in place of the faulty one.

Success! The motor now ran more smoothly, and shorting each of the hall sensors in turn had roughly equal effects, so they were now all working. Best of all, the motor started reliably every time. Interestingly it wasn’t as quiet as the other drive, but I suspect the scavenged hall sensor is optimised for magnetic fields from the side rather than the front, given how it was mounted, so it’s probably not perfect.

The last job was to realign the head slightly, because this drive was a bit fussy about reading some discs. I found a disc that it struggled with but that the other drive would read every time, and tweaked the position of the head stepper motor each way a little until this drive read that disc reliably. You can see in this photo that the stepper motor has elongated mounting holes, so it’s possible to loosen its screws (there’s another one just out of shot to the right) and turn the motor a few degrees to adjust the position of the head.

After all this work, the drive read all the discs I asked of it without any problems. I hope it’ll be OK for the next decade or two.

Denon DVD-1720 DVD player power supply schematic and repair

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A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I wanted to watch a movie. I went to put the DVD in the player, and was disappointed to find that the machine was dark and didn’t respond to any of its buttons. It was broken.

It’s hard to say that a DVD player is really worth fixing. This one, a Denon DVD-1720, is about 7 years old, and wasn’t expensive when it was new. However, I was curious to know why it had stopped working, and that alone was reason enough to delve inside.

Considering its low cost (I think it cost about £100 when new) it was very neatly constructed. Removing a few screws allows the top to come off (careful of sharp edges) and the plastic front panel just unclips with a bit of gentle persuasion, revealing the guts.

Before we go any further, I have to insert a health warning. Dealing with DVD player power supplies has health risks. There are dangerous voltages present inside. If you don’t have the right equipment or don’t know what you’re doing, you can get a nasty surprise, a terminally broken DVD player, a serious injury or be electrocuted. None of those are fun, especially the one which results in death.

Almost all the electronics are on one big motherboard, apart from a few buttons and lights at the front and the fiddly digital stuff to do with the actual DVD reading, which sits on the green board on pillars in the middle. Undoing the screws from the green board, a few on the motherboard, all the ones on the back of the machine, and unplugging three connectors, makes it possible to wiggle the board free. It’s a bit of a squeeze and the board is fragile, so don’t blame me if you break it.

The power supply is at the rear right corner. Denon have kindly marked in white the area with dangerous voltages in it.

There’s not much to it. It’s clearly a switch-mode flyback converter. The transformer is much too small to be an ordinary mains transformer, and there are no inductors on the secondary side. I did the obvious checks – the fuse wasn’t blown, and the three big pale blue safety resistors measured OK. All the diodes dioded too. Time to put my reverse engineering hat on and dig deeper.

The PCB is nicely marked with the component identifiers on both sides:

so it wasn’t too hard to draw out the circuit diagram.

It’s a pretty elegant design, using only three transistors. The circuit appears to be a blocking oscillator centred around Q1001 and the transformer. At startup, Q1001 is allowed to conduct, and current starts to flow in the transformer primary. At a certain current, the transformer’s core will saturate so the current can’t increase any more. The voltage induced by the changing core flux in the feedback winding at the bottom of the transformer will suddenly drop, creating a pulse which, fed via C1029 to the gate of Q1001, switches it off. At that point the energy stored in the transformer core has to go somewhere, and it finds its way out through the secondary rectifiers into the outputs. The basic scheme is very similar to the Joule Thief, a simple blocking oscillator for driving LEDs from batteries.

The two transistors Q1003 and Q1008 seem to be involved in regulating the supply. Q1003 can cut off the gate drive to Q1001 in response to three things: the current in R1001 getting too high, the optocoupler IC1001 conducting too much (which indicates that the output voltage is too high) or Q1008 stopping conducting. The latter seems to be a way of shutting down the supply if its output voltages get low, or it might be a cunning standby mechanism involving some more stuff on the secondary side which I haven’t investigated. C1032 seems to be there to make sure that the power supply starts up.

I powered the bare motherboard from an isolating transformer (don’t try this at home, folks, unless you know what one of those is and how to use it) and measured some things. There was precisely no activity going on at all, apart from 300V on the reservoir capacitor C1004 and Q1001’s drain, as expected. I first laid the blame on the little electrolytic C1032, since they’re the most unreliable components in any modern electronics, but tacking another 10uF across it didn’t help. Holding my breath and briefly shorting C1032 didn’t bring anything to life, either.

Then I measured some of the DC conditions. Everything around Q1008 was OK, with R1096 and R1034 merrily feeding electrons into Q1003’s base and keeping Q1001 switched off. High-value resistors are the next most suspicious components in a circuit like this, especially when they’re teeny-tiny ones. I checked around the 1.8 megohm R1005 and R1006 which pull up Q1001’s gate. Clearly it couldn’t work without them. Lo and behold, my 10 megohm input meter showed 250V at the junction of R1005 and R1006. That can’t be right – the voltage should be more like 150V, since the resistors are the same value and basically connected straight across the 300V supply. I pulled R1006 out of its hiding place and measured it – it was open-circuit. Gotcha!

Soldering in a replacement 1.8 megohm resistor for R1006 brought the whole thing back to life. The secondaries seemed to have sensible voltages on them (3.3V and 12V at a glance) so I reassembled it far enough to test. It lit up, accepted a disk and played it. Success!

It’s a credit to Denon’s neat design that there were no screws left over when I put it back together. The whole machine is now back in action for the sake of a 2p resistor.

Herrmans H-Track Standlight Modification

Avometer 8 BLR121 15V battery replacement

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The Avometer 8 multimeter has lots of useful ranges, including a special high-resistance range which can measure resistances of up to 20 megohms. This is handy, but it needs a special 15 volt battery. The battery it’s designed for is a BLR121, which was once fairly common but is now dying out. The BLR121 is just about still available but it’s expensive, and since the meter is likely to last a long time I wanted a battery which would also last, and be easy to replace when necessary.

An old solder reel, a bit of copper pipe, and five common-or-garden lithium coin cells is all it took. The coin cells are CR2032, which are 20mm in diameter, and they fit just neatly inside the solder reel. I cut down the reel to form a tube about 35mm long. The stack of five cells is about 16mm long, so I filled the remaining space with a bit of copper pipe cut to about 22mm long. This is what the assembly looked like:

It fitted just neatly into the battery compartment of the meter. The spring contacts are very convenient because you can fit more or less any shape between them!

It works perfectly, and it’s cheap. The CR2032 cells are available for less than 50p each if you shop around, and they have a capacity of around 200mAh. The BLR121 replacements I’ve seen have a capacity of only 40mAh, so the lithium replacement should last about five times longer. Not bad.

Here’s a gratuitous picture of the Avo in use checking the power supply of a BBC Micro.

Avometer 8 repair

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The Avometer 8 is a British electronics icon. For probably half a century it was the standard high-quality multimeter, found in every factory, workshop and laboratory. Though an analogue meter seems like an anachronism in today’s digital world, it’s still useful for some tasks, and there are decades’ worth of service manuals and test procedures which still call for measurements to be made using an Avo. They only stopped making them in 2008 because some parts were no longer available.

This one was given to me by a colleague who got it as part of a deal when he bought a secondhand broken TV. I’m not making this up, I promise. It (the meter, not the TV) was made in 1964 according to the serial number. It really didn’t work when I got it. It read about 30% low on all ranges, the pointer kept sticking, and it hardly ever returned to the same zero point on the scale. I was on the point of scrapping it, but decided to save it because it’s got stickers on it from the lab I used when I did my degree, and I was encouraged by advice from the people of the UK Vintage Radio forum. I opened it up:

It’s clear that everything is hand-built, and should be quite serviceable. The problems with this meter seemed to be in the movement itself – the sensitive, fragile coil suspended by precision bearings in a big magnet – rather than the electronics. The movement is so delicate that I was worried about wrecking it rather than fixing it! However, it’s only held in with two screws, so I could take it out and see what needed doing.

In the picture above, the movement has been taken out and is standing on top of the rest of the meter. With the benefit of a little advice, and a very handy article from the Amateur Radio Relay League in February 1943 called ‘Rejuvenating Old Meters‘, I set to work.

The gap in the magnet in which the coil is suspended was full of tiny iron filings. They’re not supposed to be there. They get in the way, causing the coil and thus the pointer to stick, and they short-circuit the magnetic field, reducing the sensitivity of the meter. I cleaned them out in the recommended way using a little piece of Blu-tack.

The bearings suspending the armature were way out of adjustment: it rattled and caught on the centre pole-piece of the magnet, again making it stick. I adjusted the bearings, centring the hairsprings and the coil in the gap and just taking up the slack so it could move freely. The bearings in the Avo are sprung, so the armature is never quite rigid, but there should be no rattle in it.

Things were looking up, but there was still a problem. The movement wasn’t balanced, so the position of the pointer was very sensitive to which way up the meter was held. The pointer assembly has three little arms, one opposite the pointer and two perpendicular to it, to which it’s possible to add weights to balance the pointer. It’s a very delicate operation. You have to hold your breath while doing it, since the slightest draught sends the pointer swinging wildly. This picture, reproduced from the Rejuvenating Old Meters article, shows how the balancing is done. First, the meter is set to zero while lying horizontally. Then it’s turned to stand vertically. The tail weight is adjusted with the pointer horizontal, and the side weights are adjusted with it vertical.

I used paint applied in droplets with a tiny screwdriver to add weight. You can see it in this closeup of the movement.

It doesn’t take much – the balance is incredibly sensitive.

Now to test it. The bare movement is supposed to take 37.5μA for full scale deflection. With a power supply and a resistor, I gave it a current of 37.5μA and it worked! I couldn’t tell whether it was exactly right because the naked movement is so sensitive to draughts that the pointer was never quite steady, but it was close enough for me.

I reassembled the meter, sticking the glass (yes, real glass!) back into the case as I went, and was delighted to find that it was now working – no sticking, it returned to zero every time, and was fairly accurate. It read about 1% low, though. That’s within its specification but I thought it could do better. Fortunately the Avo designers made the meter adjustable to fix such errors. There’s a shunt on the magnet which can adjust the magnetic field a little to compensate for the slight loss of magnetism as it ages. It’s the piece of metal with the slot in it, held by one screw, in this photo of the top of the movement.

A couple of millimetres to the left was all it took, and the Avo now reads correctly to within 0.5%. Not a bad result, considering the only tools required were a screwdriver, a bit of Blu-tack, and some paint. Try that with a faulty digital multimeter!