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Fluke 75 DMM repair

I think my skills at the workbench have progressed to the point where I’m feeling pretty good about being able to make minor repairs to some of my electronic gadgets.

I’ve had this Fluke 75 autoranging DMM sitting in a toolbox for a bunch of years because it never worked properly. Brought it out to the workbench the morning and cracked it open to find the 9V battery inside had leaked, and the battery posts had corroded.

Fluke 75 digital multimeter

Should be a pretty easy fix. I’ve got some 9V battery connectors with leads in the parts bin. Heated up the soldering iron and removed the old posts, then soldered in the leads for the 9V connector. The original battery posts had three connections, so I used some hookup wire to jumper the other two connections to where the connector leads were going to go.

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Dying monitor

One of the monitors on my desktop is about to bite the dust. It does this rapid on-off blinking thing for a while, and sometimes it will turn on, somtimes it’s just a blank screen. Hitting the source button starts it over again, and eventually it will stay on.

I will have much sadness when I have to go to two mis-matched monitors, or back to just one monitor.

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Laptop X-ray

My laptop, 81 kVp, 1.2 mAs.

Check out the embiggened version.

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Extracting wisdom

Wisdom teeth that is.

Had a good thorough cleaning done, a filling replaced, and next week it’s back to the dentist to have my wisdom teeth removed.

Three of them are fine and aren’t causing too much trouble. The fourth one decided long ago not to come out properly and is embedded in the back of my jaw on its side. That one does cause occasional problems, especially with trapping food. That one definitely needs to come out, and the dentist says that while I’m under, the other three might as well come out too instead of having to come back another time.

Hopefully the extraction and recovery are uneventful. I wonder if I should ask to keep my teeth…

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Radio Shack deals for builders/makers

If you happen to be near your neighbourhood Radio Shack, stop in and you might find some good clearance deals. Look for the items with blue or tan on the price tags.

I stopped in today to look for an audio transformer to build a sound card interface for the radio, and ended up coming out with a couple pieces of 4.5×6″ perfboard, a resistor component pack, and a capacitor component pack that were on clearance. The perfboard was less than $1.50 each, and the resistor and capacitor component packs were $7 and $6 respectively. The component packs are normally in the $25 range I think. Although I’ve already got plenty of resistors and capacitors, it was really the boxes that I wanted. I think of it as a two good component boxes that come with free resistors/capacitors.

My store also had a few Arduino shields that were clearance marked as well.

Might have to pay a visit to some of the other Radio Shacks in the area.