In this video I repair a Raritan Dominion LX-108 IP KVM in a very professional manner using wood. It goes on for quite some time, but that’s at least more appropriate for YouTube than other platforms. No biggie, you can always skip around using the chapters.
For posterity, here’s a transcript of the video in case you’d rather read than listen. But beware! It’s as transcribed by YouTube and so may include some errors and lack of punctuation (and etc).
well hopefully it’s repair time today I have here a Raritan Dominion lx18 8 Port IP KVM switch which has served me well for many years now it customarily sits in a rack at an off-site Data Center and obviously allows me to gain access to a few servers there that don’t have integrated uh kvms like you know an irra or a uh ILO so here are the rear ports as you can see non-redundant PS U VGA out few USB ports for keyboard mouse and uh I think I think it supports physical media as well obviously a land port and then these are the eight ports for the KVM um oh my God the remote heads you know it converts RJ45 to VGA and USB basically or VGA and PS2 as the case may be and on the front not much to see just a power LED and I tried to remote into this the other day and it just did not respond and I thought well that’s strange so I went down the data center and uh found that this thing was hot and I don’t mean like a little hot I mean like almost too hot to touch it was so hot and the power LED was off so I’m guessing that means a power supply problem and not a problem with the actual like microcontroller and whatever else is in here and I don’t know what’s in here cuz I never opened this up so uh let’s do that and take a look looks like uh three screws on this side three on that side and uh that’s probably about about
it and there we go nice and clean internally nice neat circuit board oddly there’s a fan but it doesn’t have it doesn’t correspond to any intakes like there are ventilation holes in the sides of the case and a few vent holes on the back but none on the front where the fan is pulling air and I assume the air flow is this way right oh yeah there’s an arrow on this side of the fan shows air flow would be this way right across this chip not sure what that is maybe an fpga or something and of course here’s the power supply module this sticker is sort of coming up off the oh that capacitor looks slightly bulged maybe a little more than slightly I don’t know that this cap necessarily failed and that caused the problem of course like this could have overheated like this transistor voltage regulator or whatever could have overheated or this resistor which is right next to the capacitor causing the capacitor there for overheat and bulge but uh yeah it could just be a bad cap and like I said this is my first time opening this up as you can see from the rear panel it could theoretically have up to 16 ports so I’m guessing whatever chips are missing here here here as and some other uh components down here would be populated for the 16 Port version and they’ probably just have a two- tiered RJ45 block and you can see all the other connectors all the other solder pads that would be for those extra connections rather yeah it’s missing some other chips down here although weirdly it’s only missing eight whereas it has 16 of those so I don’t know anyway we’re not getting into the hous and wi this works just so I’d point that out for fun so I think first thing to do is power this on verify that still nothing happens and then I’m going to grab a thermal imaging camera and see what’s hot after it’s on for like a minute or two or maybe even less than a minute or
two okay there’s some power let me switch it on it’s not making any noises like any um yeah it’s not making any like bad switch mode power supply noises and as you can see the power LED is not illuminated and just out of curiosity let me get a multimeter and see if you have any power on the outputs of the PSU module at all and are the specs written on it it’s weird um yeah I can’t get a good angle to show this to you right now but once I take this connector out I will be able to on the board the red wires are labeled ground and the black wires are labeled plus 5 volts which seems backwards but hey doesn’t really matter I guess I’m not feeling any heat coming off this yet it might have completely blown up I should probably plug this into an isolation Transformer before I go poking around in here but uh well let me try not to uh shock myself actually are we getting AC in I don’t see why we wouldn’t be
but 120 volts that’s fine and back to DC
no now it’s making a little bit of a clicking it almost sounds like it’s coming from the fan though yeah there’s basically nothing coming out of this oh and this heat sink is wrapped around these capacitors and yeah they’re all they’re all little bulgy yeah none of those capacitors look healthy and I’m getting a little clicking noise yeah the clicking noise sounds like it’s coming from the fan so I’m wondering why is this reading 500 molts oh no there we go okay just cuz it was open
um yeah it seems like the power supply might be trying to start up and occasionally looks like there’s some fluctuation there no heat whatsoever it’s still making the clicking noise though so it wasn’t the fan I was mistaken about that so it’s got to be this power supply trying to start up fortunately the PSU is quite modular so can’t really get to that connector easily that’s okay connect it disconnect it from that
end and now I can show you yeah ground and plus 5 volts and this connector will be connected thusly so the plus 5 volts would be on the black wires like I said doesn’t matter it’s just kind of weird weird uh component choice
yeah take that off too actually you know what kind of doing this trouble shooting in the wrong direction I’m pretty sure the power supply is shot CU of all those bul caps like those have to be replac regardless but uh let me power it up with no load and see if we have any voltage because it could be a faulty component here pulling way too much current dragging the PSU down 245 molts that seems to be just with the meter hm
is this meter jacked
up now it’s reading 246 molt with uh the probe shorted I don’t trust that meter yeah the only downside about this is it’s got that like quite a reflective screen and with the probes not touching anything it’s reading near enough makes no difference zero yeah this this this meter seems a little better uh as one would kind of expect yeah okay absolutely nothing on the output now of course a faulty component on the board could have drawn so much current that it fried the power supply so you know what let me get a since we know it’s supposed to be well it says plus 5 volts in ground but then again the red and black were the reverse what I thought they should be so I was going to say let me run this off a power supply but I don’t want to reverse the polarity do have reverse polarity protect I don’t see a diode right near the connector at least not a
no oh that is Toasty
looking okay so yeah even though it’s not hot right now uh it was clearly very hot right around here cuz the board just looks sort of blacken there and that is right under a lot of components but notably I think that’s a resistor it could be an inductor yeah it could be any of those components in that area heating the bottom of this board so I’m not really hopeful about this thing working oh and here’s some model information on the power supply stuck this capacitor which is great cuz then if you replace the capacitor you lose the model information so input 100 to 240 model PS 35-5 meanwell oh it’s a meanwell power supply it’s a good quality power supply most likely and just says plus 5 Vol 6 amps and let me see if I can just verify the polarity of the output from the polarity of the oh it’s actually labeled on the bottom of the board plus and minus let’s see does that if it’s if it’s labeled this the same way on both boards I’m going to assume that it’s correct oh I think it was just in the factory or maybe someone was in here before me if they put the cable in connected to there and then connected to there the red wires would indeed be plus 5 volts and yeah there’s there’s markings on the bottom there sorry it’s a little out of focus but it’s v+ v+ V minus V minus and right now I have the cable oriented the correct way so V minus is lining up with black yeah so I think this cable was just put on backwards probably at the factory just the way this was bent it you know like yeah so okay because of that I think I am going to hook a bench power supply up to that and see what’s going on cuz quite frankly this this is uh pretty old and outdated by now I mean Hardware wise there’s nothing wrong with with it it’s just it doesn’t get updates uh fir firmware updates from the manufacturer anymore like it’s using old encryption standards that modern browsers just get really pissy with and won’t even interact with this thing uh so it takes some configuration changes at the browser to actually use this and the software on board the web interface is just outdated kind of clunky it works fine though so like I’d be fine repairing this it’s already set up the way I need it to be and I already have my browser on my well I Edge I use Edge for like because Edge still has Internet Explorer mode so I use that for any outdated technology I tend to use and I don’t really use it for much else I don’t care if I weaken the uh encryption standards on that but if the board is shot then um there’s no real point in repairing it because it’s probably going to be one of the customiz C’s or like an I don’t know that’s an fpj or microprocessor but possibly something with firmware on it it’s not it’s going to be hard to replace and this thing is probably worth like 20 bucks on eBay at this [Music] point I got it cheap and that was six eight years ago so I can only imagine it’s uh even cheaper now but if it’s just the PSU fine all right uh key site what is this E3 G E36
313a wonderful naming convention all right so
uh we’ll set this to a Max of I mean yeah we’ll just set it to Max of 6 amps and 5 volts and I’m fairly certain that the positive and negative pins are just common together yeah they are those are pretty thick pins too for 6 amp maximum um and these are pretty thin wires but I don’t know if this thing is actually going to draw 6 amps right off the Jump so uh if these wires end up melting down I guess we’ll all have a good laugh and
power ah yep we got an LED on the front let me just cut power for a second I’ve got this Dell monitor that’s somewhat period appropriate for the device standing by not the period appropriateness matter not the period appropri not the period appropriateness matter matters but you know so I’m going to power it back on again the LED comes on I think it’s just red and it’s actually red and blue right now it’s sort of purple to my eye it looks more red to the camera and that’s its usual startup state it turns just solid blue and it’s running fine now the Fan’s not on so I’m guessing it’s got a thermal couple or some kind of temperature sensor in there so it turns itself on when needed oh yeah sorry about the moir pattern that’s just the uh camera interacting with the monitor that’s not anything wrong with the monitor itself uh see if I defocus it a little that’ll go away so if if you’re ever filming a video by the way of a monitor and it that’s it startup noise it does that all all the time when it starts up um anyway if you get these kind of patterns when you’re trying to record or take a picture of monitor if you just defocus it slightly in One Direction or the other I I think that it being slightly out of focus is less annoying than that pattern obviously if you need to show detail then you know it’s not that desirable but here I just want to show that it is actually booting up cool so power down I’m going to count that as this working and it just being a power supply problem which is awesome so now I will try to fix the power supply the fortunate thing is there’s no weird power rails there’s no crazy voltages it’s just 5 Vol 6 amps so I got a couple options I could either get a new power supply that would fit in here or alternatively I could just use an external power supply but you know 6 amps is kind of Hefty for like a a barrel plug and I don’t have any like high quality modular 5volt power supplies like this handy although if you can make it work in the case and mount it properly a small computer power supply like for a you know one of those miniature desktop Compu computers might might might fit in here and it’ll be 5 Vols 12 volts and probably 3.3 volts but of course you could just use the 5 volts off of it assuming you’d have a way of powering it up because it probably have a soft power key but anyway okay so here is a BK precision isolation Transformer it’s old AF it’s got direct output here and an isolated output here up to 350 volt and it’s got a selectable voltage Matrix which is pretty cool right now with this switch is here that corresponds to this column and then with this switch down here that corresponds to this row so it’ be at 120 volts I like this uh it’s a neat little unit quite quite old does not have a date on it going to steal the purple cable I like using multicolored cables on the bench particularly for devices under test because it makes it much obvious if you just have like an i connector on the end of it like if this was just a black cable I might have a few of these on the bench and I might grab the wrong one that’s not plugged into the isolated Transformer or isolation Transformer and uh yeah could be a bad time well first let’s make sure we do in fact have AC in it’s actually dumb that I I’m using this and resting my hand on the grounded chassis while I’m doing this but even though it is isolated uh can’t hurt to be extra careful all right so we got 121
volts I’m inclin to desolder some capacitors and test them because they’re almost certainly all effed and hopefully I have replacement parts in stock actually this is a great time to break out my brand new hako desoldering gun so it’s like a mid-range temperature
yeah well it sounds like it’s working solder’s melting let’s provide a little suction oh
yeah oh yeah that’s
[Music] nice A little adhesive there holding it on but the leads are definitely free cuz they’re wiggling nicely oh yeah o little darkened on that side probably some leakage did it leak onto the oh and definitely got hot see the board’s a little uh charred there oh yeah let me get an LCR meter and uh cheap but key site so calibrated LCR meter with cheap probes that it came with no matter we’re not like trying to get Precision measurements here we’re just trying to see how bad this capacitor is 4.9 picofarads Pico farts more like it and just for the record this is supposed to be so 400 volt 68 micro 105 degre yeah let me go check uh and see what I got in my actually let me desolder more caps because these are all bulge so those are definitely bad I mean those aren’t staying regardless and those are smoothing I mean there’s are smoothing caps in the output so those aren’t going to be the cause of this thing not powering up if anything it would just give really sloppy voltage so there’s one more capacitor stuck in there it’s not bulged it doesn’t look bad and maybe I can test it in SAU if I could see where its pins are I think it’s those two pins right there I mean I’m not a switch mode power spy guy so kind of shooting in the dark
here 58 ohms so yep [Music] also rated 105 degrees which is good this feels really light even for such a tiny capacitor uh 25 volt 100
micro yeah this is uh just thinking it’s a resistor at 1 khz so yeah this and this is probably the key this replacing this I’m wagering if nothing else has been fried in here uh that might cause it to start up so we need a 100 micro 25 volts or slightly higher and a 68 micro 400 volt now in theory if I was always running this at 120 volts I could go with something lower to handle the peak the peak voltage but uh I’ll see if I can get a 400 volt capacitor because at home I do run a lot of my servers and other equipment at 240 volts I’ve actually got a video about that if you want to check it out all right well lucky me I don’t have any 100 microfarad capacitors and I don’t have anything 400 Volt or even high voltage because I mostly do electronics projects that are low voltage so the highest I have are 50 volts and what was this one rated again so this one was rated 25 volts so here I have two 50 volt 47 micro capacitors this one was rated 100 micro if you recall so if I just connect these in parallel that’ll make a 100 micro capacitor and we can at least test the power supply and oh my God it is really blackened down there so I don’t know this might have suffered other damage too all right well what I did is this is just temporary just to see if the uh power supply will start up CU these are also like poor quality quity capacitors they’re noname Brands I I wouldn’t trust them to run this long term but I was able to get two of each of their leads to stick through yeah I’m just going to solder those in place omit this smoothing capacitor here because I don’t have a replacement for it anyway or even anything close and just see if we can get any startup on the uh power supply this is my trusted stall tools soldering iron it’s nothing fancy it normally does spend a lot of time on this bench but uh I’ve been doing computer projects lately so I put it away and not long ago I got a paast soldering station a a cheap one like well none of their soldering stations are cheap but one of the cheaper ones and I keep me to do a video about it and I haven’t and so I’m still using this
guy which does heat up fairly quickly which is
good um I’m still going to use this for the inlet okay that’s currently powered off is it going to explode
no all right nothing on the output we do have six volts across the capacitor I just put in though um do we have anything on the other side of the Transformer notada anything to this chip I’m not sure what the pin out is
but uh 107 volts DC across those two pins this little chip that doesn’t seem right unless it’s
AC I mean I don’t know what chip out up that chip I don’t even know what the pin out’s supposed to be I just doubt it’s supposed to have that kind of voltage across it just wondering if now that I repl that cap if something does try to start up in here and it gets warm
somewhere all right I’m just going to order some replacement capacitors and then come back to this I think is the best thing to do at this
point all right I’m back uh roughly two days later and I have some Digi Key Parts I did sort of the usual thing and I over purchased what I need and I purchased very high quality components these are Rubicon capacitors uh 68 microfarads 400 volts I measured them of course before I bought them they should fit in that space and I got they were fairly expensive so I got five of them figuring I’d use one for this and then have four spare and I don’t remember I think they were 10,000 hours red at 105° C everything I got is rated for 105 degrees and just like the old ones but they also are long life capacitors so they should be good quality I mean they are good quality we have the th000 microfarad or 1 mad 16vt capacitors for the smoothing the low voltage output we need three of those I got I think 12 or 13 2 4 6 8 10 12 I got 12 so I’ll have nine spare and last but not least on the capacitor front this seems too big although I did measure it huh yeah this is too wide that’s weird I’m not sure if that was a mistake on my part or it appeared incorrectly in the search results CU I searched by uh diameter but this is the 100 microfarad 25 volt I mean it’s supposed to fit in there so this is going to be too fat to actually get down in there but of course I could just leave it proud so yeah that’s probably what I’ll do is stick this one in there and just leave the leads long it should have it shouldn’t be a problem vertical with vertical clearance if it’s sticking out a little bit because
it’s a little out of focus but just to show you the height we’re working with even if the leads were fully extended uh even if leads were fully extended it would still fit within the chassis although just barely but it’ll be lower than that
anyway and I’m kind of shamefaced and that I didn’t check the transistors to see if they’re shorted cuz that would cause quite an issue I did get one more thing or rather two more things one spare if I end up using it both Digi key and Mouser sell are used to sell this exact model of power supply from meanwell but it’s been discontinued they no longer stock it but what they do have is this meanwhile sort of like an updated version I think it has a an amp of higher capacity even though it’s on a smaller footprint it’s the same width and the screw holes are comparably spaced but it’s one in shorter and yeah these are not measured in metric these are measured inches I think this one was 2×4 and this one’s 2×3 so obviously it’ll fit in the chassis I mean it’s its height is fine it just won’t attach the mountain hunting points or not all four of them anyway but we can solve that and it does have the wrong connectors on it unfortunately but that’s really not a big deal cuz even though I actually don’t have any connectors to uh crimp onto new cables I really don’t mind cutting off the old connectors and just soldering wires directly to either the board or to these terminals the input pins have the same pitch but it looks like no they’re the the pins themselves are also the same size yes the input connector will be fine the output
connector yeah we’ll deal with that if we need to and I’m thinking about replacing it with the with this uh new power supply anyway just because even if the transistors are fine on this one even if the capacitor replacement brings this back to life I still don’t trust it cuz it obviously experienced a hell of a lot of heating just based on the way the board is just a little charred almost um it’s almost Beyond just Brown it’s like actually almost blackened it doesn’t look like there’s any arcing or anything it’s just it just dark like it was heated for a long period of time which it probably was cuz like I said the entire unit outside of this the metal chassis was hot to the touch not just warm but hot and to heat up that entire metal chassis when this is only Loosely bonded to it this must have been extremely hot so even if the other components on here are okay my worry is that they’ve experienced thermal fatigue and um will die sooner rather than later so I am leaning towards just popping in a completely new power supply module even though I know a lot of people are against modular level repair it’s like ideally I would replace every single component on this board active or passive like even that chip down there probably experienced a ridiculous amount of heating so I don’t trust the reliability of this even if I could get it working with a few components [Music]
replaced 18 Nano FS um ESR 4 kiloohms at 1 k KZ I mean all these caps are definitely going to be bad 111 ohms this one’s different oh 2.7 microfarads this is the healthiest of the three capacitors and I think this is the one that was all the way on the end over here and this one I physically damaged when I was taking it out so I mean they’re all bad anyway like for sure bad not just blaming capacitors for no reason bad [Music] I guess let me throw in uh the components and then we’ll see yeah I mean that one fits quite nicely that one I definitely got the measurements right and it’s even actually the same height as the PSU so I can just sit it like that and solder [Music] away oh and I got to put this uh little transistor back
[Music] in these shitty capacitors this should theoretically if this is going to work it’s going to work now like cuz these capacitors are good this capacitor is good these capacitors have been removed which are just for smoothing so we should get a sloppy 5 volts off of this right now or it’ll blow up power switches off on the device so plug that in see if it blows up okay not getting any heat off of it but there is an indicator LED near the output and that is not lit uh I’ve got my multimeter off camera right now but let’s just see yeah no volts DC yeah I I’m just going to throw in the towel on this because a repairing this kind of power supply is not my air of expertise and B I don’t trust it anyway even if I could get it working which I can’t through simple capacitor Replacements I knew the I watch Curious Mark and a bunch of other YouTube channels deal with retro hardware and trust me I know that like replacing capacitors is not a fix all for every problem you know I’ve seen these guys like get equipment that’s 50 years old and the capacitors in it are still with within within spec and still like brand new the reason I replace the capacitors on this first off is because all these capacitors were clearly bad they were all bulging one of them was leaky on the bottom the fault is elsewhere but uh like I said I ordered a whole bunch of these anyway cuz I want to have spares so I can just take those brand new ones off of here and um actually I only put one brand new one that’s good on here I can take that off put in my spare parts bin and uh throw the rest of this out yeah so let’s just retrofit this into here and get on with our lives and besides this capacitor wasn’t even the right size for this so it’s it’s all a mess is what I’m saying let’s move on what we need to do is fit this power supply in here and oh I guess I should test it first I mean it did just come brand new from Digi key I should think there’s nothing metal under there I should think it would be good but can’t hurt to uh just verify that LE got five volts in the output right uh outputs let not short the output five oh my God I did short the output oh I guess it has anti- protection that’s good to know 51117 volts which is I don’t know how accur this meter is but close enough so as I was saying earlier here situation we got these posts which are I can’t even fit the thing in there they are approximately 92.5 mm apart in that direction and the space in this direction is again just roughly I’m not looking for an accurate measurement here 43.5 mm thly in case you were curious so I can either Mount this here to these two posts or here to those two posts and then figure something else out now this cable from the power supply connector won’t reach if I mount it to those post so we’re going to mount it to these two and then that will reach just fine and then obviously this is the wrong pinout for the cable that came with the device although so actually it be this connector in theory but the problem is it’s got that pot for fine-tuning the voltage and if it weren’t for that we could definitely get that in there in theory I could bend that pot down because there’s plenty of room behind it there’s nothing conductive back there
uh no it’s still not quite going to fit not really it’s it pulls too much okay there one option I have these they’re cheap risen clamp terminals I mean you can tell by looking at them they cheap plastic they wouldn’t be good for multiple connections and reconnections but their leavs are thick enough that I think they would handle up to 6 amps 5 amps or 6 amps whatever it was so I could replace one on the board here with that one there and then just use wire to connect between them and they’d still be relatively modular just cuz those Rising clamp terminals are not good quality in particular what I’m going to do is
just oh these pins are bigger than my soldering gun’s mouth yeah it’s not just there’s like a bunch of solder around it oh wait there was oh no the gun didn’t actually get around the pin I’ll show you in the other one cuz I’m going to do the exact same thing to it even though it’s silly yeah you can see this pin is now proud of that one it just pushed the pin up through the plastic housing as I heated it up so I’m just going to do the same thing again yep all right I mean this is still usable anyway you can just push that pin back down and it’ll be [Music] fine I’m just holding the cord with my belly against the side of the table to keep the iron in place sort of like well you can’t see my belly the camera is set of shot but yeah sort of like this my stomach or sternum is right here not sternum my zyo process area is like right about here and it’s just pressing at the table holding the cords the side iron doesn’t fall doesn’t go anywhere untour and also when you press down on the front of it it doesn’t hit the table this is how if I’m tinning a lot of wires this is what I’ll generally do I don’t know if that’s a pro tip or a dumb tip or what but uh yeah if I’m doing a lot of these in a row it’s just [Music] easy whenever I’m soldering wires coming off of a power supply or something like this I like to lay them out in the way approximately the direction they’ll be going when they come off so you can see they’re kind of soldered in an angle but I feel like that helps keep the strain off of those off those solder joints and off the ends of the cable cuz now they’re already sort of aiming where they want to go ultimately when they’re
installed again I don’t know if that’s like a pro tip or a dumb tip but uh I just feel like I like to make wires comfortable you know even though they are going to be bent over like this you know but still they’re not going to be shooting straight up is my point so why not start them on their Journey from the solder pads uh correctly what I could very well do of course is unmount this main circuit board desolder this whole connector solder these on the same way the reason I’m not going to do that even though that’s probably the correct way to do it is because ultimately if I have to replace this again or do some other kind of repair in here I don’t want to have to take out the main board which isn’t too much of a hassle it’s just uh eight screws and then desolder this from the back I am going to go a little crazy and just solder these wires directly to these pins look in all honesty if this device fails again I’m going to throw it out I’ll get sick of it so let’s not worry about how neat this job is or how uh future proof serviceable it is now the other issue is we of course have to secure this end of the board because we don’t want it springing around on those two screws that would generally be bad so you’ll notice there’s no feet on the bottom of this it’s flat and that’s sort of good I don’t want anything protruding out the bottom cuz what I was thinking I could do is tap is drill and tap a couple of new holes in the bottom and then use like you know computer screw standoff type things which I have in a lot of different sizes and just screw those in and bada bing bada boom if this thing had feet those might stick out a tiny bit but it wouldn’t matter in this case I need the bottom to be smooth because this fits onto a shelf in a rack uh between two pieces of equipment and the thickness of the Shelf plus the thickness of this unit means it just slides in there so I can’t have anything protruding off the bottom now of course I could drill and tap screw in a couple standoffs and then just like drumble them off from the bottom but that would be nearly impossible to do in a perfectly flush manner without damaging the bottom of the case in this finish and I don’t know what metal this case is made out of but that could start corroding not that it would be in a high humidity environment but just as a general rule of thumb if I can avoid it I don’t want to well actually the Metal’s no the mle’s still coated there um as a general rule of thumb I don’t want to scratch metal down to or scratch finish metal down to Bare Metal so I prefer not to do that what I could do is just put a couple of blind standoffs there and that might be what I’ll do and by blind standoffs I don’t know if that’s the correct term but I mean like standoffs that are that have threads a thread going all the way through so that basically this end would be anchored this end would not but it would at least be supported from uh bending down and hitting the bottom of the case and potentially shorting out the other option is of course to 3D print or otherwise fabricate an adapter to go under this board and if it’s you know 3D printed or something you wouldn’t have to worry about it shorting out if it’s made of plastic and then the end of the board could rest on a plate that you put under here and the plate could attach these two points and then the board could attach to the plate and that would be fine at least you know it wouldn’t be like manufacturer fine but it would be fine enough so I think let me let me try that let me see what dimensions we’re working with here so those standoffs are 9.15 9.15 mm tall I bet that’s an exact amount in [Music] inches kind of weird measurement but still all right I’m back and I got my 3D print all done it was uh it was ready rather quickly I’ve only been gone for about 3 minutes um I have a very fast 3D printer ignore the writing uh the printer prints that automatically we can just put it this way if you prefer uh yeah that’s my uh 3D print it’s not quite finished yet but you can see I got lucky and had a piece of wood that is just about flush at the top of these standoffs I mean it is actually flush uh maybe it’s like half a millimeter lower so it’s just about perfect need some finishing touches though the good thing about this uh 3D printing methodology is that the tolerances are quite
wide and a little blowout on the back but we’re not concerned about that cuz no one will see the back no one will see the front of this either except me and anyone who watches this godforsaken YouTube video I don’t know this drill bits too was indeed too small that’s all right Believe It or Not despite living in the US I do have metric drill bits these just happen to be SAE and this is a uh that the previous drill bit was a 1364 and this is a 732nd believe me I prefer a metric like oh hand me the 7302 drill bit
please just ever so slightly larger
yeah I should have stuck with where I had it before they’re not perfectly centered but that’s more than fine now these screws are of course slightly larger than the standoffs but only ever so slightly but what I’ve done and gone what I’ve done gone and done I don’t know whatever I was trying to say there is get these other larger washers and I think you could see where we’re going from here and as I’m sure all of you Keen viewers are well aware wood is an electrical insulator at least up to you know these kind of household voltages and low voltages that we’re talking about unfortunately one thing I didn’t take into account I should have actually gone for a piece of wood that’s slightly smaller because although this is like pretty much flush with the bottom of this PCB of course the component leads are sticking out and even between these two screw holes so the unfortunate thing about wood is you need to leave a fair amount of margins to avoid splitting the wood so can’t like go real tight to those screw holes and let the board settle down so now it’s a little proud on this side so you know as long as we’re uh being ghetto we got a fairly wide margin here although that’s probably for electrical safety and this is a ground connection anyway so what I could do is get a couple of small metal washers put them under there and we should be fine with clearances now of course we all know the one downside about wood especially with as an electrical insulator is that it’s flammable so if this board did go thermonuclear it could burn this piece of wood ah it sounds bad but this is in an all metal chassis and the wood most likely isn’t going to combust in a violent flame it’s going to smolder and maybe flame a little um in this metal enclosure in a rack between two other metal chassis it in other words the risk is low this is a very small amount of combustible material and the reason I have this electrical tape is just to get ahead of myself because like I said there’s a decent amount of clearance right there when I put a metal washer below it but you can see it’s kind of close to those pins right there and those are line voltage so we will increase the safety rating I I don’t this look none of this is stuff like I recommend as like the ideal way to do it this is just why I’m doing it and I’m comfortable with this if you’re not comfortable with this then by all means don’t do it this way and then we punch a small hole in the electrical tape and now we have an insulated washer which is of course going to be a little bit Thicker Than This washer I mean to be fair for looking at tolerances but I don’t think that uh tiny difference is going to make much of a difference difference this is the side next to the live connections I was putting that in the wrong spot and this side has little pads to ground and that’s where these uh class y safety capacitors go that’s what those two pads are so this is meant to be grounded so we’re going to leave a bare metal washer there and that should be fine and this electrical tape is not going to you know you got to be careful with electrical tape in that situation because if it were in a pinch point between one of these you know leads coming out the bottom of the board it it the lead would just poke through the tape and render it null and void and useless the point is this is the tape’s going to be in contact with this flat section it’s really more to Insight the side of the washer and like this parts of the washer closest to these contacts which is why we are going to put the fold of the tape that way and it’s just to prevent arcing really nothing no there’s no there’s going to be no contact between the washer and these pins at all it has enough clearance here just just keep that in mind I’m not advocating using one thin piece of electrical tape as your entire safety margin between a live and a uh and the outer shell of a metal chassis that you might touch that’s just to prevent arcing between one of these pins which it probably wouldn’t Arc anyway because there’d be a few millimeters between them like probably about that much space it probably wouldn’t Arc over at these voltages but just in case we put a little extra insulation that’s all I’m saying I’m not saying that electrical tape is the B all and end all for every single insulating [Music] circumstance how am I always losing things where did I put that other screw okay I am baffled I’m going to use a different screw and then the only thing I need are two small like wood screws to drive in there and these are too fat these are the right length where they won’t bottom out but they’re definitely too fat and they have a fluted head I’d prer a pan head in this circumstance obviously uh give me another second yeah where is my screw box like my computer screw box oh my God no I couldn’t find that forever and now I can’t find it again where in the [ __ ] did I put the screws where in the [ __ ] did I put the screws where in the [ __ ] where in the [ __ ] where in the [ __ ] did I put the screws where in the [ __ ] did I put the screws where in the [ __ ] did I put the screws where the [ __ ] where the [ __ ] where the [ __ ] [ __ ] are all of my screws no seriously where the [ __ ] are they and we have to worry about clearance a lot less on this end because this is going to be the low voltage end um unfortunately I only have like I had screws that are too long screws that are too short if you’re the type of person that likes everything done just right with lots of fancy and perfect 3D prints made with special graphics and everything looks just so and is totally awesome all the time you’re watching the wrong Channel I
think like for example sawdust in my electronics not that I want it in there I I blew it out but you know what I mean like some people are going to get you know and I can’t blame you you know what let’s be extra about this but as much as and then I need another screw for this side but I’m not too worried about it cuz this uh power supply isn’t going anywhere you know what I mean now before I connect these leads to the board let me just make sure that the polarity is correct because I was going by the printings on the PCB but we all know sometimes the printings on the PCB can be wrong I’m going to be confident enough to assume that thing’s isolated properly yes it is I’m not getting a shock through my chest and we got 5.1 volts positive which means the polarity is correct now these are square pins I actually recently purchased a wire wrapping tool just to have some fun with it but uh I think the wires it would wrap would be too thin and I would need solid core wire in this diameter which I don’t think I have and it generally would all go to [ __ ] if I try doing that so I’m not going to do that look you and I both know that there is some engineer watching this video who is [ __ ] their pants in Rage at this but uh yeah that’s what we’re going to
do so basically what I’ve done is I wrapped that component lead around two the pins and then what I did is put the wire in between the two component leads or the one component lead that’s bent around and the two pins of the connector and blobbed a bunch of solder in there and I think that’s actually a good way of doing this better than just putting in parallel and trying to get some solder between them cuz this is going to create a really solid joint it may not look that great but from an electrical and mechanical standpoint it it it it’ll be fine or so I tell
myself I’m just experim here
this like that’s not going anywhere and it’s got a good electrical connection and now on my messy bench let us test this out all right plug in the Monitor and I’m going to turn it on right about now and let’s see what happens if anything okay light in the chassis is glowing purple right now in the front that is a very good sign I believe it takes a moment to start up the suspense is killing me uh is the monitor cable plugged in yeah oh oh it’s made the noise that it usually makes when it starts up but no why is no video coming out of this thing is that just the monitor being pissy let me just unplug the Monitor and plug it back in because the front light is glowing blue on the unit now which is oh yeah oh it was just the monitor that was pissy okay that’s fine or the monitor didn’t syn with the device yeah that’s what we want to see hooray and then I’m just curious what is the voltage dve or what is the voltage coming off the PSU when it’s under load 5.08 Vols oh you guys can’t really see that but yeah 5.86 n volt I could in theory probably use that uh pot to dial that into exactly 5 volts but should I no you know what I’m just going to leave it cuz slightly higher voltage it’s going to get some voltage drop on the tracks on the board wherever else I mean that’s like after actually you know what I’m just going to leave it cuz that might be the voltage I mean this should be well regulated but that might be the voltage when it’s under very low load is this heat SN yeah the heat s’s warm but not hot but like maybe if I have multiple sessions open I think the sports up to two sessions and it’s doing a lot of activity then it might draw more current and drop that voltage a tiny bit more but yeah okay cool cool cool cool and let me just uh for the sake of argument make sure that was the monitor so I’m going to shut it off I will go back to the Monitor and flip the switch and you can see the uh standby light is yellow now it was green before and it was saying like no signal even when it was hooked up to this so this is more the correct behavior for the Monitor and once the system boots and we hear that beep we should have video by then
hey okay now yeah now it’s showing the whole boot boot
process and for those of you that were curious that is the boot process the only Oddity I guess is that the fan isn’t spinning but I don’t know if it like only turns on when needed it’s not turning very freely but is that just
because now this fan might be a little shot its bearings might be shot CU like is it applying voltage to the fan connector yeah it’s trying to put five volts out to the fan well damn so the fan is shot I mean sometimes a spot of oil in there like very fine oil will get a fan going again so I wonder if the failure mode for the power because it’s definitely the power spy that failed I don’t think it’s that this overheated and then that somehow caused the power spy to overheat and the capacitors to bulge and then this to fail I mean that is possible sequence of failure like the whole chassis heats up from lack of air flow across this but then again this fan isn’t exhausting really much air out of the chassis it’s just getting air off of this heat sink and into the rest of the chassis so I don’t really it would be local heating that would be the problem here and not heating of the entire chassis so I’m still more inclined to think that something in the power supply failed first it could also be the fan failed Drew way too much current that caused the power supply to overheat so would it shut down in over current circumstance or would it just overheat and die so anyway yeah possible the fan pulled way too the fan failed pulled way too much current CA the power supply to overheat that caused components and or capacitors in it to fail which maybe caused a Cascade failure within the power supply and then yeah the fact is we’ll never know but this fan is definitely shot so I’m not going to put that in the video I will look for a replacement for this I might have one on hand I should have tested that on a bench power supply independently because I just assumed it wasn’t spinning because maybe it had some kind of thermal cut off I I think it is supposed to spin all the time cuz there was voltage here at this connector oh that’s annoying so anyway thanks for watching uh that’s been the halfhazard repair of this thing Raritan Dominion DLX 108 it says l oh DLX 108 is d stands for Dominion on the bottom it says DLX Jesus Christ on the bottom it says DLX 108 on the front it says LX 108 but Dominion but anyway none of that matters um I’m curious what does everyone think about using wood inside a piece of electronics like yay or nay I I obviously say yay I look I wouldn’t have done it this way if this wasn’t a cheap thing in the first place and it wasn’t like probably the easiest way to do this and it like I said very secure I think it’s fine but uh I’m sure some people will will hate this let me know what you think in the comments um I know I didn’t do a great job here I know that I wasn’t trying for Perfection trying to get this thing to work don’t really care how it looks don’t really care if someone gets mad at me about it as long as it works and it’ll work like it will work you can’t tell me this won’t work that’s the thing like you could say h it’s horrible why would you do that voice though I don’t know but the fact of the matter is I bet this thing works for another five six 7 8 9 10 years should have just upgraded it from the start but then you wouldn’t be able to see me do like I’ve never seen anyone repair a high-tech device like this with wood at the very least give me credit for doing something that you don’t usually see on YouTube even though it’s dumb I don’t know if that helps whatever anyway thanks for watching Evan Scott uh I’ll get a new fan I’ll put this back together it’ll be fine um so long I’m just going to salute now for every video that’s it uh oh tail sleep yeah like And subscribe and whatever the [ __ ] I don’t
know I figured I’d do an epilog actually because I ordered a couple of new fans from Mouser and there they are I got two because this is a fairly common fan size figured it can’t hurt to have one in stock put it in my parts uh bins the dumb thing is if you saw my previous video I had had two fans of exactly the right size that came out of a little disc
enclosure and to be fair I had actually forgotten about these at the time I ordered the Mouser fans I didn’t even try to see if they would fit and I realized afterwards they would but the whole reason I took them out of the drive bay unit in the first place is because I I never heard this brand I didn’t trust the quality these fans I didn’t trust them to run for a long time without making weird noises or just seizing up entirely so uh I’m still not going to use these even though even though they would fit just about perfectly they’re the same dimensions and I do believe they’re 40 mm by 10 mm and actually just out of curiosity what brand is in here sunon and these brand new fans are nidek I did not bother checking CFM air pressure anything like that it has a completely different blade design or at least a little bit of a different blade design but I I don’t think it matters this just lightly blows air across this chip I I think whatever this does is going to be good enough I want to do this whole epilog just to show you the fan replacement process it it’s not terribly complicated but the fan is attached to this metal bracket and unfortunately the fan is screwed in from behind starts a little of focus I’ll show you when I take it out but there’s a screw head there and one diagonally opposite it down at the bottom the bracket I thought was screwed in From Below like you can see it’s got a couple of nuts there I thought those were attached to screws from the bottom but you can see from the scratch marks I thought these were just like plastic or nylon covers pop them off get to the screw heads but no it appears to be that that’s metal I think it’s either pressed or welded in there so the only way to get this bracket out and therefore replace the fan is to get a not driver of the appropriate size so one moment please of course it’s sa it’s probably these are probably metric nuts if I had to guess so yeah I’ll be back okay this is a weird shaped tool holy [ __ ] I’m pretty sure I have some other metric drivers in the garage I’m just being lazy and trying to find something that will work in the basement uh yep all right so once at Great link this is not magnetic when in doubt use electrical
tape I have a feeling getting these back on here without a magnetic tip is going to be a struggle but hey whatever there we have the two nuts disconnect power to the fan and then it’s got this little zip tie connecting it to the front power LED indicator wire or indicator cable doesn’t really matter now the only issue is of course the replacement fans I got don’t have connectors but they do have nice long leads so if I had the appropriate style connector I could just crimp it on the end of here and run it over there no problem I could do the uh ghetto thing I did earlier which is to solder to the fan connector but instead I’m since this Fan’s dead anyway I’m just going to cut this splice it and then uh move on from there and yeah so here you can see the bracket and the fan just being held on by two screws
diagonally yeah I mean the fan isn’t really dusty but it is a little grimy just I think from years of operation it just has like that thin film with like hard baked dust and it’s like it’s basically seized up it won’t spin freely at all and let’s just compare it to the new fan you see the new Fan’s got fewer blades but it does spin [Music]
freely measure once cut once is what I say I’m just going to do spice like this oh heat ring tubing
[Music]
I think I got the lengths a little bit off yeah the red wire is a little bit longer than the black wire but uh it’s going to be I’m going to bend it out of the way similarly to the original installation so no big deal so the airflow indicator arrow is there it’s kind of hard to there we go you can see it in the reflection and so we want the fan to be facing this way with the bracket behind it and I think if yeah since all of the wires coming out this way you’ll see that’s going to Route them back towards the power LED cable going to zip tide again and back from once it
came and now this just gets mounted back in the old
chassis there we go
nope [ __ ] my fingers can’t [ __ ] how do I do the first one so well my fingers won’t fit through this Gap so just use the screwdriver to sort of guide it in
there want those in I mean not like overly tight but don’t want those nuts coming loose and rattling around in here especially shorting out something on the high voltage side of the power supply that would be
messy I guess to be thorough I could have tested these fans with a bench power supply before trying to use them but H let’s just uh do it the oldfashioned way and grab a power cord
switch it on and yep that fan just started spinning it’s got a nice nice breeze to it uh can I visually represent this too here’s a lighter piece of
plastic yeah so you can see the air flow there and so just as I guess from the factory it was like pulled a little harshly I thought previously so I’m going to like leave a little bit of slack not enough these cabl can or these wires can get into the fan and of course these side Cutters are the best things for getting zip ties cut nice and flush because after all that’s kind of what they’re meant for oh and I guess some of you might be curious about how loud this fan is as we know it’s loud in the basement and this is going into a data center so I can’t really give you a measurement right now because the background noise is going to be louder than this fan but I’m just going to spin it up again put it to my ear
and yeah it’s not the quietest tiny fan I’ve ever heard but it’s it’s relatively low RPM it’s not Buzzy at all uh once the case is closed up I don’t even know if you’d hear it maybe in a completely silent room you could vaguely hear it if it was like right next to you I don’t know but it’s very quiet and the next step is just to close it up hope that I didn’t lose the case screws in the process of all this faffing around yeah they’re right here at least I hope that’s all of them and then the only thing is when closing the case it’s got a lip here on the front that goes under here and then it has a tiny tab there which hooks into a slot there so presumably we just put the case on like that slide it forward and yeah that’s really all there is to
it I guess what I should do is just make sure this thing works one more time now that I’ve closed it up cuz you know that happens sometimes you uh close something up and you realize you forgot to I don’t know make a connection or you know whatever happens and then it suddenly doesn’t work when you go to Power it up and it’s something stupid obviously I would hate to bring this back to the data center where it lives just to find out that it does not in fact live I guess I could uh oriented like this you can see the power LED simultaneously with the monitor and like I said the power LED looks purple to my eyes um it’s kind of Overexposed in the cam there if I turn it that way you can kind of see that it’s more purple it’s kind of white there because it’s too bright for the camera’s exposure settings but yeah purple so I think it’s red for error purple for sort of booting or doing some other activity maybe and it’s usually blue once it’s powered up and working fine so it should beep loudly and go to a solid blue there yep there it goes beeps loudly and it’s blue and we have the login screen so I am I don’t actually have any of the dongles actually I think I do have compatible dongles here but I’m fairly confident if if it doesn’t work by now it’s not going to work so anyway that’s it for the video uh yeah thanks for watching the epilog see you later not see you later what’s a good ending
