Quieterer

So when we last left off with rehoming my wintendo's computer gubbins in a new case, the fans were quiet-ish, but maybe not perfectly quiet.

The basic issue is that only one fan port on the motherboard supports a direct PWM fan speed control, while the rest use a much more primitive voltage control. With modern low-power fans, the voltage control really doesn't do anything useful, so the fans run at full speed pretty much all the time.

So one of my CPU heatsink fans, plugged into the yellow port above the RAM sticks here, gets PWM control, and the rest are just noisy-ish.

So what's a person to do if they only have one fan port with PWM?

Well they're low power fans, so let's just give them all the same PWM signal. This does technically mean that the case fans will be spinning up in response to CPU temperature rather than ambient case temperature, but with the size of the CPU heatsink I think those are going to be pretty well correlated most of the time.

Finding a place to mount the board was a bit of a trick, though. It's too big to fit on the back side of the case, and the CPU heatsink fans don't have long enough wires to reach that open area past the front of the motherboard, so I eventually figured out that I can stick it up behind one of the case fans (temporarily removed here) and while it's not perfect, it's at least good enough.

And the result? Much quieter. Quiet enough that the dominant noise source is the spinny rust down at the bottom of the case, and that's not going away any time soon, so this is as good as it's gonna get.

Some things need fixing, some things don't

I had for a time written off the idea of getting a Roland D-50. The price had been driven up a fair bit by nostalgia for certain songs that featured it quite heavily, and once I got the rack mount version, the D-550, I had full access to its sound engine and thus had no need for getting the keyboard version.

But sometimes a deal just rolls along that's too good to resist, for a unit that's "broken" but not broken.

So I might as well pull the ladder up after me and let everyone know how to fix these themselves.

Not Synth For Work

So today in the "it was cheap so why not" category, I found a Roland JV-880 rackmount synth module with a dead display.

And other than the sticky adhesive stuck to the top of the unit, this was the only fault with it. Lucky days!

Feeling Powerless

So I was about to do a little bit of video editing when I noticed that my Wintendo wasn't responding to the power button. You know, the one that's usually supposed to turn it on. This wasn't a particular surprise to me as the power button had been somewhat flaky in the past, often requiring multiple pokes, but this time it was quite solidly dead.

I had a poke around inside, and as per usual, the first thing we must do is to check if there's even any power making it to the motherboard. So the multimeter comes out to measure what's on the +5Vsb pin.

Well that would explain it. I guess it was the power supply going soft, and now the 5Vsb rail has completely collapsed.

Except hang on, something else isn't right.

Right, false alarm, it's just the UPS needing new batteries.

Yup, that fixed it.

Anyway, let's install this new power supply that I bought before figuring this out.

And while we're at it, a new CPU cooler probably wouldn't be the worst idea, since I've just been using the basic boxed Intel heatsink for the past 13 years.

That poor assassin, it must be lonely not having any peers.

And, you know, since I'm in this deep...

Hmm, this might have gotten slightly out of hand. Click below to read on.

Groove V

It's time to embark on another project, and this time most of the work won't be done by me. I do not have the patience and free time to engage in an entire re-roof by myself.

I do, however, have the patience to pre-paint some v-groove soffit boards, as some of the existing ones are water damaged, and it's way easier to paint them before installation rather than after.

First up, the v-groove boards.

As for the paint, I've still got half a bucket left over from when I ripped the vinyl siding off the front of my house.

And needless to say, I'm glad I have a paint stirring attachment for my drill.

The first coat goes on as usual.

And no matter what it says on the bucket, paint never covers in just one coat. So, on goes a second, and after it dries it looks pretty good.

An hour down on the ground painting these on sawhorses sure beats spending who knows how long up on a ladder trying to paint them upside-down.

A Vegetative State

It's giardiniera time again.

Not much to report for this batch, except that I ran out of bay leaves and so one jar is without, and curiously two jars failed to seal properly. One was still holding a vacuum but with the lid not sucked down nearly as tight as it should be, and the other leaked down to atmospheric pressure completely.

I think the one that leaked down completely is probably the one that fell over sideways in the pot when I was pulling them out after canning, but I'm not 100% sure about the other. Either way those two go in the fridge while the rest go in the cupboard for me to nibble on over the next 6-ish months.

Getting Toned

The Yamaha TG33 is a desktop synth module, which the big Y prefers to call a "tone generator" for reasons beyond human comprehension. It's basically the sound engine from the SY22 with a little added spice and no keyboard. I picked one up from the land of the rising sun with the promise that it was fully functional. This was almost, but not quite, an accurate description of its condition.

How so? Click the video to find out!

With that bit of fish-exorcism dealt with, it still needed a bit of cleaning, thanks to the decades of dust that had made it between the LCD and the protective window it sits behind. It was apparently in a bit of a dusty environment, as evidenced by the volume knob.

So yes, this dust needs to be evicted.

Thankfully it wasn't stuck on or anything, so it was pretty simple to brush away once I managed to disassemble the entire module just to get at this part.

It probably wouldn't be a bad idea to just replace this LCD module at some point. The viewing angle is awful and the backlight is best described as just "a suggestion of illumination", but that's a problem for future-me. Present-me is just happy that I'm not looking through a bunch of dust to see what's on the screen.

And last but not least, this can't be a desktop module if it doesn't sit properly on a desktop, so let's give it some grippy feet.

And that'll wrap things up for this one. Another job well done.