WiGLE.net

...Dumpster Diving, that is.

Or not even with dumpsters.

While wardriving last night, I spotted a massive television out on the curb with a bunch of other "junk" to be picked up by the trash truck. I muster up all my strength to wrestle it into the back seat of my beater.

I get it home and see some damage. The power and channel buttons are missing (broken out) from the front. It's a Sanyo though and so is our puny 13" TV, so I grab the remote and it works. I hook the cable to it and I fire it up. The CRT sounds like it's alive, but no picture, static or anything. About a minute later I finally see some dark splotches of color. No sound either. Well, crap.

Anyhow, I opened it up and noticed that one of the three high voltage lines coming off the flyback transformer was just hanging loose, out of it's rubber boot. It looks like someone had tried to fix it because the wire was routed and wound around the neck of the screen in an odd fashion.

The flyback can inductively store tens of thousands of volts. Touch one of the wrong wires inside a TV and you can die, or get hurt badly. So I carefully remove the rubber boot from the flyback, slide it back over the stray wire and un-tangle it, and plug it into the transformer.

Bada-Bing. Picture.

No audio. Menus in like german or something. Found out the audio was set to go to the RCA's on the back. Found the language settings and made it all English again, had to tweak the hell out of the color, brightness, contrast, tint, and all that. They were ALL out of whack. No clue what the previous owner was trying to do.

My guess is that the wire popped out of the transformer and the screen went blank, so they messed with the menus until they [censored] everything up really good, then opened it and saw the wire hanging there and they couldn't figure out where it went so they wrapped it around the screen for some reason, then gave up and put it out at the curb.

Anyhow... 15 minutes of troubleshooting and I have a really nice 31 inch TV. Blows the hell out of the 13" I've been using for the past 5 years.

Only down-side is that it doesn't fit in our entertainment center, so I had to do some re-arranging, and go buy a cheapo wal-mart TV stand.



By the way, if you're not familiar with TV's and other CRT-based devices (monitors, all-in-one computers like the iMac, etc) then please don't try your hand at repairing them until you've learned some stuff from an experienced technician. People have died from the stored energy in the flyback coil. I knew what I was doing.

That's awesome! I had a friend that picked up a massive 6' tv from a bar that was throwing it out 'cause they thought it was broke. Thing worked fine when he got it in his apartment. Every computer I own (except for theones I got for $5) were free from people throwing them out.

I actualy beat the heck outta myself repairing a monitor uhtu was going to throw away once... one slip of the scredriver and ZOT. I think it explains a lot about my behavior, wigle in general.

Also, I can help but notice WipeoutXL on the screen. great game!

ark

note to would-be arkasha-assassins: he's now wise to the "old monitor" gambit.

yah, I bit myself on the flyback of a giant old wooden cabinet black & white TV that was at my parents house when we moved down here to Kansas in '88. I was quite small, too. Dad said if I could get it working I could use it exclusively for my colecovision and timex sinclair 1000. It just made a horizontal line on the screen. Lo and behold the connector to the yoke was loose on the backplane. Too bad I didn't know to stay clear of the big dusty red wire. I was on my knees on a concrete floor, too. I'm lucky I didn't f'n die. My legs tried to stand straight up though, and the force of my legs contracting like that threw me about 5-6 feet.

Now I ground the anode, or use special vinyl tools when working on TV's and monitors.

And good catch on Wipeout XL. My most modern console is a PS that I got my wife before we got married, like '98 or '99. It still works. Wipeout XL has an awesome soundtrack, and it's still one of my fave games ever. I also rock GT2 and Hydro thunder. I'm a motorsports junkie (WRC and Formula One mostly, not nascar, circle tracks or straight-line dragstrip stuff. Real racers steer both ways and use their brakes.) so I'm a sucker for racing sims. When I feel like a racing game with "funner" and less realistic physics, I'll pop in NFS3.

someday GT4 will come out. someday. really.

Someday I'll have a PS2 that can play GT3, and hopefully, GT4.