"We need to X-ray this board". I can practically hear the sighs from around the world as thousands of viewers think "Damn... I wish _I_ had an x-ray"

X-ray, thermal ... This is where Batman goes when something in the cave breaks down.

Nothing more satisfying than a well regulated power supply.

Wow, a Sencore PR57 on your bench! I'm impressed!

He's got a Hadron Collider in the back yard

Viewing x-ray images in MS Paint 😂

The IR camera I got for my phone was _the_best_ $400 I've ever spent on tools.

I thought you meant it rhetorical, when you said you're going to x-ray the board. Nice repair video.

Very useful bit of kit. Excellent repair!

It nice to watch a repair video from someone that has a professional repair stance, alot of the videos from the fly by night mobile techs are an insult to watch as a professional, or anyone with proper training. You sir got it goin on, I tip my hat to you.

Fantastic video as usual, thanks for all the really advanced electronics insights!

woah thats some crazy piece of equipment

Keep doing more repairs, I learn alot of techniques from you.. and man you have some really really kool toys.

The GW-Instek front panel seems incorrectly labelled for a UK mains plug. In this plug, the live is on the right. Upside down (as the plug would need to be) it is therefore on the left, which is marked "N". Great video - always find the repair ones interesting, I particularly value the way you talk through your reasoning. Thanks.

I really enjoyed the video. Well done with your diagnosis and repair.

Yup, I need an X-ray rig too ! Thanks a lot for this video !

Awesome video, thanks a lot!

Nice look over! I have a GW function gen. Good stuff.

That's a beautiful unit, and absolutely enormous! You mentioned it was large but still I was shocked to see the top-down view.

Wooow how nice repair ! Great!

Nice fix! Good job :)

Nice job as every time of course!

Interesting! By looks of the front panel legend if you put a UK BS1363 plug in that socket the line and neutral connections would be reversed.

Nice piece of equipment.

Great instrument!

I have the big brother AC source, Chroma 61705 at work, 12000VA. Good job on the repair investigation. I feel like I follow these a bit better than your more technical videos :)

Great job!

X-Ray machine for troubleshooting, :D. Well done, as always.

Very interesting video. Only thing missing was running the unit at it's voltage, current and power extremes to verify operation. Carry on.

Nice!😀

Looks like a lovely device....

Wow. That’s a nice unit. I managed to get one of those Sencore units and that works well for my applications, but this unit provides a lot more control and measurement . I like your use of the thermal imager. I picked one of those up from the Keysight eBay site a couple of years ago, and it is a great tool for troubleshooting.

Nice thing there and it works in my frequency range

"... $400 which is not cheap..." at :58. Cheaper than any scope probe or other cable mounted accessory from Keysight! The best used AC / DC power supplies are, if you can find them, from Kikisui. To match your other test gear, emtest has some 4 quadrant programmable supplies which can source / sink power. Like the Keysight stuff, if you have to ask the price, you can't afford it (hint made in Switzerland, >$10,000).

14:49 Loved the Pooch cameo. Great repair as always! I always learn something from your repairs. Out of interest were you able to track down a wire bonder for one of your earlier challenging repairs? Cheers!

X-ray the PCB is the machine gun version of buzzing out the connections.

I'm quite certain this was actually made by NF Corporation in Japan for GW-Instek. It's basically a programmable power synthesizer.

Nice work. Perhaps you could film all the actual ic removal and probe connection stuff or perhaps some snippets. I am sure curious how you do some of those things. I seem to spend ages making reliable interboard connections as I never seem to have the right type of pin or socket on hand so try to make them with copper wire and solder.

Ahh it's back up!

I have no need for an X-Ray. I want an X-Ray.

No idea where one would use this. Maybe testing in development? To precisely measure how a product will behave? To test whether a charger or razor will work with cheap converters? I'd like to know. It's beautiful.

Why did all three opamp ICs fail? I would assume you figured this out, but you did not say in the video.

It's always weird when devices that look fairly modern when turned off have absolutely ancient GUIs when turned on

Nice, I watched your repairs from the very first one many years ago and I'm fascinated how much more possibilites you got now. It seems that you have so many fancy and advanced ways of troubleshooting, that there is no error you can't find within a few hours. This also shows a lot of out of the box ways of thinking about something which is very nice. Greetings, Michael

Nice device, i just have a simple adjustable transformer.

I am amazed of your skills to find cheap offers!! The only on eBay is used and cost about $3,000 right now! :-)

Well, I think I'm going to save for and invest in a thermal imager. Every single diagnostic is going to start with a thermal imager check 😆

The unit has been discontinued. Maybe that's why 3 Opamps could be defective at the same time. Redesign for reliability maybe an interesting next episode.

That thing has a noisy output and crappy sw but it is a beast for LV124 testing.

It assume for the serial connection just the DB9 connector has to be soldered / mounted. It looks like the level converter chips are already soldered to the board.

Hi Shahriar, thank you for this very educational video and walk through as always. Could you provide some references to learn more about the voltage regulator ageing? I'd like to learn about the fundamental phenomena that drives the ageing and whether this impacts other types of ICs. One of the problems I often face at work is needing to buy parts from the open market to cover shortages - these parts can be several years old. We only qualify the parts by checking MSL, solderability, and functional (feature) testing. Thanks in advance!

NF (a Japan company）also have a same power supply

Oh come on, you should do a full teardown and show us all the internals!

I wonder what may have caused three opamps on the same power supply to blow up. My guess is that there was a spike on their power supply due to aging voltage regulator - enough to momentarily exceed maximum voltage these amps can take and blow them up.The fourth opamp survived other due to some additional serial filtering on its power supply or just being a little more tolerant because of natural manufacturing variation. What do you think?

When I need to do serious reverse engineering on a board I like to use GIMP. I will take a picture of the front and back of board, put them on separate layers in GIMP and adjust the transparency to get get a view of both sides at the same time. I have one more layer added to trace lines and make notes. Having a layer to add an X-ray view would definitely be nice.

Fun

In what situations do you need AC source with DC offset?

Did the differential between the +5 and -5 cause the op-amps to heat up because they were working overtime?

Very often I think "oh such a device would be handy now", then I see what it costs and turn around...

Typo in the video title: "AD/DC power source".

How are the “power amps” that are shown in the block diagram implemented? I’m guessing they must be some kind of high frequency switching converters with good filtering, since they make such a clean waveform in the output. Linear amplifiers would surely dissipate too much power in this application.

👍👍👍💖👍👍👍

Did you sell from your instrument collection. That's why I can get in used price.

Haven't watched the entire video yet but I noticed that coin cell. Is it alkaline? (edit) great video! I can follow a smart power supply repair a lot easier than some of the high end RF units but I love them all!

No clue what killed the three opamps?

I wish I could become your student... 🙂

Shahriar, what thermal imager do you use?

What xray machine are you using ?

It was the caps 2200uf x3 and 1000uf like on all the gw Intek programmable supplies

he has thermal camera but uses bare hand to check if the IC hot

Why only 88.6K subscribers?

Never expected to see a commercial instrument from a reputable brand with a universal plug of dead (A European two plug power lead fits diagonally across live and earth with the pins still exposed during contact)

What high voltage differential probe is that ? In the video it says "fully isolated", but the ones I know are not isolated. They have high impedance to ground ( like severa MOhms ) but they are not galvanically isolated.

Do you have any idea where to obtain the QL3004-0PFN100C FPGA placed on the control board, or a replacement board? The IC apparently has to be programmed so buying one from a random source is not an option.

It's a glorified A/B audio amplifier attached to a waveform generator, cool.

I didnt see the bulb powered on and emitting light so I guess its all smoke and mirrors 😉

Can the Xray do tomography? The PSU seems like a clumsy design. I would have pursued a single board solution.

We would never have another GW-Instek instrument of any kind after our past experiences with them. Their equipment is so very unreliable, going wrong at some point is the normal for this make. It's totally pot luck as to whether what you have from them will last or not :(

This a weird one.

0:21 Socket not plug lol... Any conclusion as to why those op amps failed? or did I miss that.

expensive test gear and even more expensive test gear to fix it :)

Did you expect to find vacuum tubes? 807s? inside it??? All this running a 5 watt lamp!

Bargain!

Thanks, great debug video. Those 3 parts were 90C. And you knew something was drawing a lot of current. A thermal camera is great, but a wet finger or a $20 IR thermometer would find the problem parts pretty quick. Did you say what the parts were? And any theory about why they croaked? Design stress, excess input voltage or output current? 5V op-amps on +/- 5V? Weird load fault? A stray screwdriver? Counterfeit op-amps? Mystery continues...

You did excellent fancy repair using all these instruments but I may say you are TOOOOO MUCH sensitive to the aging issue and no need for that replacement ....

Wait, that is a 5800$ power supply?? Jesus