I have hot water!

I was able to have a hot shower for the first time this year.

I went to Jaycar, and bought the bits I need to make the interfaces (without the pcb to go in the slot).

The guy put the wrong transistors on the receipt.. $10.50 for 6 20c transistors? I realised when I got back to my bike, so I just went back and sorted it out.

I came home, soldered up the interface.

I opened the decoder, traced the tracks from the card slot, found where they joined to the board. I soldered the points on.

I plugged in the serial cable, made up a serial adapter, plugged it all in.

setup the card sharing server/client.

It didn't work.

I could see traffic on the software, but it didn't work.

I was using a win95 laptop.

I fiddled around for a while, and decided to try using 98 as the client.

Rebooted the box, bang, it's working! (except for being scrambled because the card in the server doesn't work anymore).

I went and got the working card, put it in the server, restarted everything, but it wouldn't work.. hmm.

I realised I hadn't pressed the "start" button on the client. Oops. Then it worked. Hooray!

I went back and forth for a bit, trying to get the 95 laptop to work, no good.

I put the working card back in the other box.

Halfway there, now I just need to get the other box working.

I made up another interface, these only take a few minutes.

I had a smart idea.. use an old gold card (since they're no good anymore) and I had a stuffed one anyway, I carefully soldered wires on to the pads of the chip, and put it in, it didn't work. Either it's not contacting properly, or the card itself is interfering. I desoldered it, tested for resistance, a lot of pads were joined together.

I sanded and scratched the chips off the back of the card, just leaving the pads, I soldered the wires back on, put it in.. it works! This bypasses needing to make pcbs now (not too pretty though).

I went to borrow the working card again, but my brother and his friends were watching tv.

I made another serial adapter, found a long bit of cat5, went in and setup my parents pc as a client. The cat5 was about 1m too short.

I went and found a serial extension cable, d'oh, db25. I went and got my db9 -> db25 adapter. D'oh, the db25 is female to female.

I found a db25 male to male. Now I have db9 female -> db25 male -> db25 female -> db25 female -> db25 male -> db25 male -> db25 female -> db9 male -> serial adapter. ( -> cat5 -> interface).

Guess what? it didn't work! I expected this, I would have been terribly surprised if it did work.

I went back and found all the rj45 joiners I could (2), then I chained together the 3 longest bits of cat5 I could find.

I ran a lead from my pc, outside, inside, through a room, to the loungeroom, into the interface.

It still didn't work. Maybe the cable is too long.

I dragged it back, and plugged it into my decoder. It worked again.

Hmm, now I am confused.

Maybe they changed the card slot in the newer box, and my dodgy card interface that works in my box doesn't connect properly in the other one.

I swapped the boxes, and took the one I couldn't get to work away.

I opened the decoder, started tracing the tracks so I could solder on the interface. they had changed the card slot, I couldn't get to the pins in the socket now, I started removing the plastic of the slot (I found in my box the plastic pulls away from the pins) in the process, I managed to snap the slot. Oops.

I had a spare slot on my PIC programmer, that I don't need anymore. I desoldered it.

I removed the rest of the slot. I noticed there was a surface mount capacitor missing from right near the slot. Uh oh.

I found the capacitor on the chair.

I finished tracing the tracks. I should have just poked around with the meter.

I put the new card slot on (luckily the pins lined up), and I reattached the capacitor (my first go at surface mount). I soldered the interface in too.

I plugged it all in. It still didn't work.

I put a card in, it didn't work. Uh oh. I think I've stuffed this.

I felt sick.

I continued fiddling around. Maybe it's the capacitor, maybe I didn't solder something in properly, maybe it's the interface.

I removed the interface, still no good. Now I was feeling really bad.

Maybe the cap is polarised, and around the wrong way. I think it's shorted anyway. I removed it again, had another go. Hmm, I think there's only half a capacitor here.

I left it. I've had enough. I'll look again tomorrow.