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The latest video from my good friend Dan, the Canadian Computer Collector. Not tech related, but definitely worth sharing. Any organisation that seems to knowingly allow fraudulent ads on their platform doesn't deserve to be in business. 

A day of highs and lows. A huge thank you to those who attended my very first kit-building livestream! 30 minutes before starting the stream, I discovered my air conditioner in the workshop wasn't working on a 36ºC (97ºF) day! I didn't have time to look at it so I just had to endure the heat.

The kit assembly went smoothly until I discovered a small piece of copper missing from the kit, so I wasn't able to complete it. I made a quick visit to Jaycar Electronics and the great people there raided another kit to furnish me with the missing part. Now my DIY muiltimeter is up and running! Let's face it, you can *never* have too many multimeters.

On to the air conditioner. I was reminded by Colin from  @ThisDoesNotCompute  that if something's going to fail, an electronics workshop is probably the best place for it to happen! I opened up the AC to find a little visitor had taken a wrong step, ending his life and completely frying the PCB of the air conditioner controller. I decided to name my poor little friend "Zappy". After some cleaning and re-establishing a path for the electrons with some wire and solder, the air conditioner is back up and running! 

I think I would have saved people a lot of anxiety if I'd just included this image in my Laundry Sink Ultrasonic video... 

We all know there just aren't enough tech channels on YouTube, 🤣 so we decided to make one more! Please check out  our new tech chat show Startup Disk is Full. We hope you like it, but if you don't, rest assured it might get better.
 https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCV1L... 

For those who watched my livestream from 20th June 2022, this is the Macintosh LC III logic board after spending some quality time in the ultrasonic cleaner. To be honest, the "before" shot really doesn't clearly show just how dirty the board was. 

For those who caught my last livestream, I have successfully repaired that SE/30 with the horizontal lines. I didn't get a chance to look at it again until today, but during that time off I had a chance to have a good think about the symptoms and possible causes. Graphics issues, which would suggest a problem with the RAM in bank A, but I was getting an error message telling me there was a problem with the RAM in bank B (even though bank B was empty). I started to suspect that it might be one of the RAM multiplexer chips (which serves both banks of RAM) and sure enough, UJ3 was the culprit. I replaced it with a new 74F258 IC, and she sprang into action! 

My first community post! To everyone who has been watching my "Building a brand new Macintosh Classic" videos, I made some important discoveries. I have found a couple of design faults on the board. No criticism to Kai, this is just part of the fun of prototyping!

There were a few pads that were a little large, and were touching a trace they shouldn't be touching, causing a significant short on the board. I also found some vias that weren't meant to be vias, creating another short on the +5V and the -12V rails. I have "fixed" these, and am now getting power to the CPU (and other ICs) but still no chime or display.

More updates to come!