Gadgets
TV Transplant Surgery Successful
Feb 20th
I fixed the blue line problem on my LG Plasma HGTV today after replacing a circuit board, but now Dale Earnhardt Jr’s car is orange!
After removing all of the screws holding on the back cover of the set, It took a while to figure out the easiest way to get the to board I needed to replace and remove the fewest wires and other components as possible. I ended up removing all of the wires on the rear-most panel except for the power connector lines that were located on the bottom right.
The board swung freely so that I could get my tools and hands behind the left side.
Replacing the board wasn’t a big deal except for the little swing connectors on the two wire harnesses at the bottom. After I figured out how they worked, it was easy, but I did break both of the ones on the old board trying to figure out how to get the wires out. Basically, it the locks are on a hinge and swing up and down. When down, they pinch the wires in the correct place.
I put the whole thing together and the sound was great, but no picture. After sitting there a while thinking about all of the wires I unhooked, I remembered one that I forgot to put back in place. After removing the back of the TV again and connecting the wire, everything worked great.
NOTE: Dale Earnhardt Jr. is driving an orange car this weekend.
Blue line on 42″ LG plasma HGTV
Feb 13th
The mostly persistent thin blue line on my 5-yr-old LG plasma TV.
Well, I’m going to try and repair my LG Plasma HGTV. The model number of my LG Plasma is DU-42PX12X.
Here’s the story…
A few weeks ago, my 42″ LG Plasma HGTV began to occasionally display a thin blue line on the right side of the screen. It would appear for a while, then disappear for a while. We are now going on about 5 weeks and it is always on the screen now. It is about 1 inch wide and is about 6 inches from the right side of the screen.
Of course, the first thing one does these days when something like this happens is to hit Google.
Apparently, after reading only a few blogs, I have been lucky. Many LG TV’s purchased in 2004-2005 had this problem after only a couple of years and most of the blog posts are from a couple of years ago.
I got away without the problem for 5 years.
After checking out only a few Google results, I landed on a blog post that had very detailed instructions on how to fix the problem. The comments on the post were lengthy and most people who followed the instructions sucessfully fixed their TVs.
So, this morning, I ordered a LG Electronics / Zenith “Hand Insert PCB Assembly” – part number 6871QCH038C from partstore.com. The part should be here by next weekend.
I’ll update this post when it arrives and let everyone know the outcome.
UPDATE: Transplant surgery on the 42″ LG Plasma HGTV was a success, fixing the 1″ blue line running down the right side of the screen.
Windy Weather in Fairport, NY
Oct 7th
Weather in Fairport, NY
Oct 2nd
This morning, I finished the installation of a wireless personal weather station at my house.
I ordered the Davis Instruments Vantage Pro2 Plus Wireless station from Ambient Weather.
The package that I chose included a WIFI router from Hautespot Networks and it connects wirelessly to my home network and sends data from the weather console in the house to the Web without the need to connect to a computer. Since I use Apple MacBooks (ie: laptops), I didn’t want to run a PC to constantly act as a server and send data to the Internet.
In order to separate the wind unit and the main weather station, I added an extra wireless transmitter to the package so that I could separate the two and locate both of them in different places. I also added a heater unit so that the rain collection unit won’t freeze in the winter time.
The anemometer is on a mouting pole on the apex of the roof and captures wind speed and direction. The wind data is send via a solar powered unit that sends a 2.4GHz wireless signal to a console in the house every second.
The main collection unit, the main part of the weather station, is mounted on a fence post in my back yard . It collects information on humidity, temperature, rainfall, rainfall rate, UV, Solar radiation and barometric pressure. These data points are sent from another solar powered 2.4GHz transmitter every second to the house where it then meets up with the anemometer data in the display console for display in the den.
The display console hooks to the wireless router and that sends information through my broadband connection to the Web.
The sites receiving and displaying the data are WeatherUnderground, WeatherBug, HamWeather and the CWOP network.
CWOP stands for Citizen Weather Observer Program and certain weather stations can feed that network data to be used to help with weather research by private, public and government institutions. I was assigned a station ID of DW3513.
Data sent to the CWOP program is analyzed and compared with nearby stations and the expected predictions for the area where a PWS is stores. Here is the page that shows the results of station DW3515.
Finally, there is a cool map called the WunderMap and also a full-screen real-time page from WeatherUnderground that is pretty cool too.
Flickr photos of the mounting locations and devices are posted as well.
RadarScope was worth the price
Aug 31st
RadarScope from Base Velocity
I paid $10 for RadarScope from Base Velocity for my iPhone via the Apple Store.
It is a very cool application, though I don’t understand all of the radars it accesses, but the basic radars are very useful. It has multiple detailed radar choices and the information is nearly real-time as far as I can tell when using it sailing and we see serious storm clouds brewing!
I’d say, “Yes”, RadarScope was worth the price and worthy of the “most expensive app I own” award.
What is the most expensive smartphone application you’ve purchased? What does it do? Do you think it was worth the price you paid?