Wednesday January 2, 2019
17:23:31
This was meant to be a test entry to see if the macro to automatically create a public blog post from this file upload from the M100 would work. Sadly, reality has a way of crashing in and ruining plans. 🙁
When I fired up my M100 this afternoon to type this out, bear in mind that it’s already running with one of the spare motherboards after an apparent capacitor failure in the VEE power supply section of my original motherboard. Well, I guess this board has another (different) capacitor failure now – switched it on, and the screen lit up, date advanced to 2019 as expected, and then the LCD began losing contrast. I turned the dial to keep it dark but eventually (after 5-10 seconds) hit the end of travel and watched the screen fade to nothing.
The machine itself is still working – the BEEP test works – it’s just that whatever part of the circuit supplies the LCD contrast control voltage is dead. I hope that’s on the motherboard and not the LCD panel itself, so if I re-cap the failed part of my original motherboard I can go back to that without also needing a new LCD board.
It’s a little bit amazing to me that this old hardware all worked so well for over a year after I bought it, and now it seems like it’s all starting to fall apart at once. I mean, considering the age of it I shouldn’t be surprised at all, but it feels like more than just coincidence that so many failures are happening now, one after another.