Seems like yesterday you were replacing caps for the first time, now you're building component PCB. Great work!!!
Thanks man! Just FYI though, "stevie wonder" (AKA thesteve) of course designed it, I'm essentially helping to get the word out and I made a nicer image for it all!
I guess my role was helping to pester him into doing this, though. I was trying to use the Red-Y and Blue-Y off the chip many months ago, and he was helping me to try to fix the signals with circuits he was coming up with on the fly, but we didn't succeed. In later thinking about it, he decided it'd be better to take the RGB Red and Blue signals and mix them with the working Luma and give up on fixing the existing signals that the chip was producing. So that led to the current circuit that you see. I DID design and build a component circuit for my SNES though with what I learned from steve! I wanna make a separate thread about that later though!
But yeah, fixing my ole Express via full capacitor replacement was good fun! When I was in my teens, I actually would fix mechanical failures for VCRs for this local Resale shop. They'd buy the VCR broken for a few bucks, and gimme $10-20 if I could fix it in my leisure. Rubber band stuff, cleaning, worn out springs, even changing the heads with a new cylinder if I could get the part ordered from the manufacturer (my suppliers were Dalbani and MCM electronics), that sort of thing, etc. But it always bothered me that I didn't understand electrical components and how to handle their failures, etc. Normally, like I said in the video, when I was a kid, always wanting to open up electronics to see what was inside would usually lead to the end of the product functioning...
Ah well, it was all in the name of science! These were necessary sacrifices!!! Heh-heh!
I guess from what SignofZeta said, I'm kind of wrong about something else I said in my video, about the 10-20 year cap failure rate and that NEC just got a really bad batch of electrolytic capacitors and that's why their hardware has had such a high cap failure rate. Wikipedia suggested that if you don't power on a device that has such capacitors and leave them sitting there for 5-10 years, that could accelerate their failure rate, hence the use 'em or lose 'em bit... Well, I dunno... Anyhow, I guess the evidence seems to point more to that NEC, one of many producers of electronic devices, was the victim of a bad patch of electrolytic caps as were others of that era.
Anyhow, on the status of the component circuit, I'm currently waiting for steve's next revision... His latest findings are that the Luma signal comes out late by a few milliseconds in the current circuit design and that causes a color shadow apparently. So, expect an upcoming revision to the current circuit in the first post when I hear from him. He said another 3 resistors and an amp will be needed...
