The £500 Dirty Photo

 I've been attempting to stitch together sets of photos from die shots for ages. I've managed about three so far, one of which was a big one. The latest attempt has been a failure on every computer I have, and each failure has taken hours in some cases, even overnight. The computers I have are mainly second hand and none of them are very modern or powerful.

Having a definite job to do I decided to buy a more powerful machine to do it on. So I spent £500 or so on a new (ok second hand) machine.
The result is a 386MB TIF file. I can't really post all of it here, so I've got a scaled down version:

This is an 8Mb version of the file. It's about 2000 pixels on a side, which is considerably smaller than the 10000 pixels on a side that the full image uses. The zoom that is possible on the full image is much greater than this scaled down version.
Unfortunately there's some dirt on these photos, which I'm not very worried about as I can retake some or all of the photos and rerun the panorama generation. The dirt is in the middle of the ROM so not the best place it could have ended up.

So there we have it, I spent £500 to get a dirty photograph.

Rainwater Harvesting Pump Controller Problem

Our rainwater harvesting system uses a pump and that pump is controlled by a, well, controller. This has worked fine for years, but about six months ago it gave a fault and I had to press the reset button to get it going again. It then ran for several months, but about four weeks ago it tripped again, and then it tripped many times.

The controller is a controlmatic E, I believe and it has a PCB inside which performs all the functions. From the symptoms I thought it might be an electrolytic capacitor problem as the frequency of occurrance is increasing. I took the PCB out and tested the electrolytic capacitors and found that they were fine. I then took the power supply dropper capacitor out and tested that and it did not look fine. I replaced it with a parts bin capacitor and the controller ran for a few days with no faults. I bought some new capacitors as I didn't want to leave a parts bin component across he mains, even though it seemed to solve the problem. It was also slightly wrong in value. I put a new capacitor in the PCB when they arrived and the controller has run ever since with no faults.

I have a couple of videos about it here:

https://uk.rs-online.com/web/p/polypropylene-film-capacitors/1447774/

https://uk.rs-online.com/web/p/polypropylene-film-capacitors/8712613/

A Different Disk Drive Teardown

There's a lot of disk drive tear-downs and disassembly videos on YouTube, but I have done another one. This one is different in that I have used some of my tools to tear the drive apart to a greater depth than I have seen elsewhere. I've decapped ICs, chopped the PCB up and chopped into bearings. There were some surprises too.

The first video is here:

 There's currently seven parts, some more may come along afterwards.

Part 2 (PCB Disassembly):

Part 3 (PCB Layers and a transistor):

Part 4:(The Tu Device)

Part 5 (Smooth Dillon and LSI Chips):

Part 6 (Flash Chips):

Part 7(The Heads and chip):