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Friday 27 May 2016

My monitor died

My monitor died.

It hiccuped a couple of times first; cutting out then coming back, and I kind of hoped that it would fix itself. But they never do.

And it cut out. Leaving just a clicking noise, which ladysolly woke me up at ungodly o'clock to listen to and diagnose as "monitor not working".

So I went on to Ebay. This is a 2560 by 1440 27 inch monitor, 16 million colours, because I like having lots of screen, and they aren't that expensive these days, about £160.

The first monitor I bought cost slightly more than that and was 14 inches, 320 by 200 pixels, four colours.

So it looks like I need to shell out another £160, but there's a couple of problems. 1) it comes from Korea, so that will take a week or two and 2) I need to use another monitor while that ships to me, which will be a hassle.

So then I had a thought. Could it be the power supply? The power supply has a little light, and that wasn't lighting. I put a voltmeter on the output and it was showing 8 volts, and it should have been 12. Aha!

So I dug out a general purpose power supply, dialled it to 12 volts, and plugged that in. The monitor came alive, but it flickered and hummed. That's because my general purpose power suppies aren't smoothed.

Down to the workshop.

I took the old power supply, and cut off the output lead, because the old power supply isn't going to be useful in future, and the output lead has the right plug for the monitor. It wan't long enough, but yesterday, while I was out caching, I found a two-core mains lead with a broken plug, and did a bit of rubbish clearance. I got that out, cut off the plug, trimmed the ends, and soldered it to the output lead from the old power supply, so now it's long enough. All I need now is 12 volts.

My first thought was to use a 12 volt PSU that came with something else. My second thought was, wait, the standard PC power supply has a 12 volt line. So I added a female Molex to the far end of the cable I'd made up. So that when I connected it to a standard PC power supply, I got 12 volts to plug into the monitor.

I took it upstairs to my office, and realised that I wouldn't need to use another power supply, because I have a standard PC power supply for powering the various Raspberry Pis. So I plugged it into that, plugged the other end into the monitor, and everying is working fine!

Now if only Daisy Communications can fix the fault that's developed in my internet connection, which started 15 hours ago and which is still faulty ...

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