New Project

My good friend, Chris Galardi, has finally moved back from Florida. Welcome home Chris...good to have you back! One of the things he found while unpacking was a non-working Roku Soundbridge R1000 radio. Pretty cool device. It connects to a wireless network to bring you free internet radio stations. Chris told me that it simply doesn't power up any longer and that it was mine if I wanted it. After graciously accepting this radio, I took it home to look at it. I did a little research on google for problems pertaining to this model of radio. Most of what I found pointed to a power supply issue. I was not able to find any schematics for the power supply so I was going to be flying by the seat of my pants with this. I opened up the unit (no easy task) and after an hour, I finally got to the power supply. I did find some puffed up capacitors. Those are definitely bad and can be caused by too much power or just faulty manufacturing. The google search said to replace them all. I have all but two in my stock and will need to order them. I will replace them with higher voltage rated caps. Hopefully, that will be the fix. Here are a few pics:







The Roku Soundbridge Radio



















The power supply to the radio











A couple of the "puffed" capacitors

Windows 7

I have been using Windows 7 enterprise version at work for the past few weeks and really like it. Recently, I purchased a refurbed pc from Dell and it came with a free Win 7 upgrade. Got the upgrade yesterday and installed it last night. The more I play with Win 7 the more I like it. Once I move all my apps over to the new pc, I will give the old one to my dad. Then I will take his old one and give it to my daughter. Cripes....I should open a freaking computer store!