Month: September 2018

Static over DisplayPort (WHL #33F5)

Okay, I admit – this is a lazy one. But I’m busy playing Path of Exile :mrgreen:

Before removing the faulty Ednet DisplayPort cable from my desk, I gave it another shot and tried capturing the artefacts on camera. A tad difficult as I noticed that the most prominent stuff is only visible on a pure black (#000) background and is very much gone on colorful backgrounds or even patterned images. Which makes it quite hard to capture without the noise from the now pretty underexposed camera sensor. And the autofocus has nothing to focus on, because if there is, the fault goes away. […]


BenQ EX3501R, AOC U3477PQU and a faulty DisplayPort cable (WHL #33F4)

Well, who would have thought that the BenQ needed another blog post…

Last week, the line flicker described in got significantly worse. I switched graphics cards the week before (Radeon 260X out, 380 in), which resulted in a driver reset and one Windows boot for the short sighted, but it also caused a bit of movement on the cables, as my computer is rack-mounted. Flicker stuff was the same for a few days.

Then it got so bad that it not only had those intermittent lines, but there were entire blocks of lines just black, audio stuttered, and the entire screen went dark for a second every so often. […]


Bloody chip markings (#R6)

Geez. Just wasted half an hour finding a part number with the actual part in my hands. Maybe I’m getting old. Maybe I should have slept more or less (noon isn’t too bad on a Sunday, is it?). Maybe chip markings are getting dumber with every nonsense package invented. Maybe I should purchase components on my own so that there’s some mail history about it. Who knows.

Care to find that on your own? Now’s the time.

Hints: That’s not TO-220, obviously. It’s also not D2PAK/TO-262 (available in DPAK, though)

It’s a N-channel MOSFET with LV-TTL compatible gate threshold voltage. […]


FlowerPower LED GrowLight POWERLIGHT 400W Repair (#P8)

Yeah, sorry for not delaying this until I could declare project #P420, but sometimes I’m a little impatient to get content online. After all, I’m not as enthusiastic about this silly number as some folks apparently are. Which also means I’m getting paid in hard cash and not in kind…

So for today’s repair project I have a quad-100W growlight unit on my desk that was in mortal agony when it arrived. The thing does not have a power-on indicator (usually you do know when it’s on…), all it did was some dim, erratic flickering of the LEDs. […]