Hi there.
I'm wanting to get into repairs more and I'd be starting on the ground floor. I was wondering what oscilloscopes people here use and recommend. This is just for hobby work, so nothing terribly, terribly expensive!
What would be a great scope for general arcade board repairs?
THANKS!
Congratulation on getting into the wonderful world of repairs...
With the newbies techs at musem of pinball in banning ca.
We normally start them with credit switches. Soldering wires and dealing with heat shrink. I get to see how they follow directions.
Crimping wires and replacing headers make those wire harness gremlin (poor connects issues) a thing of the past.
Learning about power supplies is a must. The basic electrical wiring of a cab comes in handy. Bob Robert's has a diagram on it that should help you..
Learning the difference between linear power supply and switching power supplies is important. A nice digital volt.meter is a.great.thing to have...
Learning about monitors is a must. This includes both crts and lcds and even 3 gun projection. Depending on what arcade machines you collect. There is more to fix a monitor than replacing a cap. An esr meter can tell you if the cap you have is I'm good.condtion or it needs to be replaced. A crt rejuvenator will tell you if the tune your working on is good or not. Crts do go bad after a while..
So on to pcb repairs. Most pcb are very old computers. Cpu, ram, pia and pio. The basics is signal goes in something is suppose to be coming out. A scope will show you what goes in and what goes out.
A logic probe will tell you the presence of a signal but will give you odd reading if the signals are not strong enough. Each chip number represents a differ function.
Is this chip a buffer or an opamp. Knowing what these chips do will help you to determine what signal should be at which pin of the ic chip..
It's a lot to learn and sometimes even when you know what is wrong, you can't fix it due to parts not being available.
