Rubicus' blog

So I have a 10 year old computer standing around, that I’ve previously used as a router. Now that I have a TV I thought it would be nice to have a computer connected to it, and since I have several computers, having a central storage ponint for files would be nice addition as well. While the computer is 10 years old, it has an Intel core 2 duo E6600, an ATI Radeon X1950 pro, and 2 GB of RAM, so it should be able to play 1080p material without to much trouble.

So I figured I would like some sort of RAID structure for this in case of a drive failure. The plan was to run a RAID 5 structure with 3 1 TB drives. This way I can get 2 TB of storage with redundancy in case one of the drives should fail. I also use an old 30 GB drive for running the OS off, since it’s so much easier booting linux from a non-RAID partition.

So here’s a followup on my last post (found here)! The chip arrived fairly quickly. Placed the order on tuesday night and I had it the next monday. I decided I needed some practice soldering first (don’t want to have the actual T-con board in my TV be that mess of black horror that my practice boards turned into), and so it took me a while until I had the courage to go for the real chip. Since I had trouble finding PCBs to practice on it took some extra time. Finally got it done yesterday, and well, it’s working! :D It’s actually working! I actually have some trouble believing it myself! Really happy though! Sorry about the crappy picture quality (taken with my phone from the sofa in a dark room).

This post will mostly be about the process of switching the chip!

I finally bought a TV after contemplating it for a long time! Got a used 37’’ LCD screen TV for what I considered to be a really good price. I used it for maybe 2 hours and was very happy with it. Really good picture with clear colors, nice blacks and, most importantly, it accpeted a 1080p input from my computer.

Sadly this didn’t last for very long. Suddenly the pictured turned grey, and became almost completely white, with the remaining picture having weird rainbow-like colors, as can be seen in the picture below. This made me a bit sad. However, I decided to not give up easily, and instead look forward to the opportunity to be able to tear down and repair a TV. That process is what I will be covering in this blog post.