This image shows a slightly soiled circuit board (highlighted by the red arrow) due to C123's electrolyte leakage. Sometimes certain types of capacitors, called electrolytic capacitors, will leak their inner fluid called electrolyte. I had accumulated well over 200 of these log sheets amassing over 5,000 successful electronic repairs. We logged each of our repairs on a log sheet and I numbered mine in the top-left corner. Clearly I could do better.įive years went by. While I was certainly relieved that the problem that had eluded me for hours the day prior was fixed, I was troubled that it took someone else just one hour or less to fix it. It said, "Hi Carson, I replaced a bad capacitor after you left. I flipped my soldering iron's power switch to ON and then noticed a sticky note on the amp. When I returned to my bench, the daunting Ampeg was still there. Perhaps I'll just start desoldering individual components and testing them out of circuit. Am I really cut out for this? The next morning I returned to the battlefield with nary a plan.
Maybe I was just lucky with those first few repairs. My confidence wained and I realized this repair stuff wasn't going to be a walk in the park. I even stayed an extra hour that day but eventually gave up and went home defeated. I could not find the source of that crackle. I spent hours on that thing, probing around with a Simpson voltmeter and an oscilloscope. I breezed through a few guitar amps, a Yamaha DX7 keyboard and then I got an Ampeg V4 bass guitar amp that had a crackly sound in the speaker. Their response was, "When can you start"? Soon I found myself sitting at a work bench with a hot soldering iron, a dead piece of music gear and no prior experience of professionally fixing anything! I managed to get through four pieces of music gear on the first day and my confidence was building. I was just starting my job search and asked if they needed anyone to repair music gear. I tagged along with a friend as he went to a local music store to get something repaired.
It was 1988 and I had just graduated from ITT Technical Institute and moved to San Diego, California. So how do we quickly get to the crux of the problem? Let's start with a little story.
#FIXING A PAPERBOY ARCADE GAME SOFTWARE#
What I learned bridges two barely related fields (musical instrument repair and software design) but reveals a common approach to solving any technical problem in any field quickly. Through the years, I have refined my skills at sleuthing out that particular point of difficulty, or crux of the problem, causing a failure or malfunction in a system under development. The longer it takes to fix a problem, the more it's going to cost somebody. In engineering, problems crop up and when they do, it's prudent to solve them quickly. But the most important thing you can do with it is SAVE it!
Take either one: You can spend it, waste it, lose it, have too much or too little of it, donate it, borrow it and invest it.
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