Tom, You are so correct about the new circuits. It brings two stories to mind. I have a friend who has a eprom burner. both he and his brother had the same make and model car. The computer went out on his brother's car. The dealer wanted over $400 for a new computer. My friend took the old one apart and found a eprom inside. He took the good one out of his car and copied it. When put back in his brother's car there was no problem His brother then drove to the dealer and told them not to order the part that he got his fixed for $5.00. The dealer then asked him if he would make a few for the dealership. He just laughed and said "NO". Another ham operator friend had a Lincoln and the sensor that automatically turned the lights on died. He looked at it and there was the message stating no user replacement parts inside. He cut the plastic box and found a bad resistor and cap. For a few dollars he repaired the $100+ sensor. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Tom Fowle" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <blindhandyman@yahoogroups.com> Sent: Sunday, September 23, 2007 3:16 PM Subject: Re: [BlindHandyMan] New Tool Review
It is surely true that in theory anything with a digital display could be made to talk. And it is pretty easy when done at design phase rather than a retrofit. Retrofitting used to be a bit easier when stuff had more individual (discrete) parts and they wer larger. Now-a-days everything is done with microcontrollers and/or customized chips and the connections between the chip and display are likely hidden on very densely packed circuit boards. Of course no manufacturer will ever let anybody at the control programs for the microcontrollers to modify them appropriately because they're precious trade secrets! <HA> If we had a small army of very talented technicians who could reverse engineer devices and do the high skill soldering rework necessary it would be great. such high quality techs are rare and hard to find. and the work is very difficult. Several years ago, a french company manufactured a so-called universal talk box. They had designs for adapting it to a number of VCRs and such. Trouble was they couldn't find or keep people who wanted to do the rework let alone pay them what they were worth. tom Net-Tamer V 1.13 Beta - Registered To listen to the show archives go to link http://acbradio.org/handyman.html or ftp://ftp.acbradio.org/acbradio-archives/handyman/ The Pod Cast address for the Blind Handy Man Show is. http://www.acbradio.org/news/xml/podcast.php?pgm=saturday Visit The Blind Handy Man Files Page To Review Contributions From Various List Members At The Following address: http://www.jaws-users.com/handyman/ Visit the archives page at the following address http://www.mail-archive.com/blindhandyman@yahoogroups.com/ If you would like to join the Blind Computing list, then visit the following address for more information: http://jaws-users.com/mailman/listinfo/blind-computing_jaws-users.com For a complete list of email commands pertaining to the Blind Handy Man list just send a blank message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Yahoo! Groups Links
