Hi Nick, thanks for the welcome. I had a maiI from Pramacin and I also sent a mail direct to Dieter. He has replied so I will share what I have learned so far in case it can be of use to anyone else. First point is that my clock had run flawlessly on the same power supply for 6 years. I run it at selected hours on a 7 day timer, around 40 hours per week (so about 12,000 hours running in total with 5 of the original tubes - had one with a gas leak that I replaced about 2 years ago). I sent a mail to Dieter and he was very helpful to diagnose the possible issue within 36 hours. He gave me some points to test the voltages as per the red text on the attached image. Based on the results I got he strongly believes it is IC03 on the PCB (yellow circle) which is a UCC38084 current mode controller in an SO-8 SMD package . It can be replaced with a UCC38084D, UCC38084DR or a UCC38084DG4. It was likely taken out by the 12V power supply which I found was dead so I am guessing that when it died, it sent a spike into the clock. Unfortunately, he is not prepared to make a repair on the board and I as am in rural Japan so I'd need to ship it somewhere in any case. I don't think I'll be able to find anyone locally that will do the job. I have some soldering experience but have never tried reworking SMD chips. If I was going to attempt this I would need a hot air station but I don't do enough to warrant buying anything fancy. So I am thinking to take my time and try to learn a new skill. I saw a report from Dave at EEVblog who rates the simple 858D rework station good value and seems to work well enough for small jobs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vva2t21sOAs If anyone knows of another cheap unit I'd love to hear - I really don't want to spend much at this time. I have a few old boards laying around that I could hone my skills on before attempting a hack at the Blue Dream. If I find it too challenging, I might contact here again [image: 😊]
If I manage to get this running again, I am going to use the best quality 12V supply and a shitload of capacitors!! Paul On Wednesday, December 12, 2018 at 7:03:45 PM UTC+9, Paul Atkin wrote: > > Hi All, > I have an IN-18 Blue Dream that has run happily for 6 years in a dust free > display case. During that time, I had just one tube go bad with an > apparent gas leak. > > I have been operating it on a timer so it only powers on every evening > which has also worked fine. > > Just a few days ago, the tubes didn't light up when expected. I powered > it up on a second 12V supply (confirmed working) but no joy. The LED's > light up, but on initial inspection it seems I have lost the internal > 170VDC power. I am not a specialist and have no schematic so I was > wondering if anyone has skills or knowledge to help me troubleshoot this. > > Thanks in advance > > Paul > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "neonixie-l" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/neonixie-l/d3e6d6a7-81e5-447a-bf05-739c45beeae1%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
