Thoughts on "Best Electronics"

Deal with Atari hardware long enough, and sooner or later you're going to come across "Best Electronics" (http://www.best-electronics-ca.com/).  While I haven't done a ton of research on the company, I gather that at one point they were a (or possibly THE) official Atari repair shop.  When Atari called it quits from the gaming biz, Best ended up with most, if not all, of the leftover stock of systems, games, accessories, repair parts and miscellany.

The first thing you're likely to notice is that browsing their website is like time-traveling to the early nineties.  Seriously, just fire it up and you'll see what I mean.  Monolithic old-school HTML pages complete with in-line gifs, center-justified spacing, funky font color transitions, and yes, a hit counter at the bottom of the page!  The whole thing is disorganized and difficult to wrap your brain around, but kind of fun if you aren't in a hurry to find useful information.

Some pricing is available on the webpage, but they reserve the complete price list for their printed catalog which they insist on selling for a profit.

Browse the web page long enough and you'll come across references to their "##+ year Atari tech".  If you're a fan of Top Gear, this is basically their version "The Stig".  A mysterious man (or woman!) identified only by reputation and credential.  And they are very rare to miss an opportunity to evoke the ##+ year Atari tech.

I've only dealt with them a handful of times over the years, and it is always something of a charming hassle.

They seem acutely aware of the need to protect their profit margins, as any business should, but it emerges in some annoying and disingenuous ways.  For example, they set minimum order amounts which change from time to time.  The justification for this is the cost to ship.  They absolutely will not budge from these minimums - even if you eliminate their excuse by offering to pay the extra shipping and processing costs.  Furthermore, their vaunted parts catalog cannot be counted toward the minimum order amount.

On top of the minimum order amount, they charge a healthy handling fee.

So I wanted to buy a sealed copy of the Tempest 2000 soundtrack.  This is a $5 item.  The minimum order amount at the time was $20.  When I offered to pay whatever extra they thought necessary to offset the cost of dealing with small orders, they resorted to what I have classically termed "the idiot's defense" - that is when faced with a rebuttal which logically defeats your given reason, you simply return to the beginning of the loop and start repeating the already-defeated premise of your argument.  This is not to say that they are under any obligation to allow me to circumvent their minimum order policy, but that I would appreciate it if they would be honest about the policy and just state up front that the minimum is there to make sure you buy more stuff, not to offset the cost of dealing with small orders.

But I digress.  So I wanted to buy something that costs $5, and at the time that was the only thing I wanted.  I attempted to quickly scour the website for something that would help me meet the minimum while I had them on the phone, but as I stated earlier, it's not what I would call organized.  I ended up hanging up with them and calling back to complete the order after finding that they sell the Jaguar cart connectors for $15.  I will probably never need one, but as I only have one Jaguar, replacement parts are somewhat appealing.  So now I had an order for $20.  Then, of course, they had to apply "Shipping" costs on top of that, which came to about $1 million space bucks.  Seriously, though it was about $8.  That was ALMOST cheaper than buying a new copy of the Tempest 2000 soundtrack from Ebay.

While I ended up spending more than I really wanted to, I got what I wanted and a little something extra so I called it a wash.  Not a great experience, but not a terrible one either.

So recently I got the urge to clean up and mod a Lynx II handheld (which is a story for another day).  One of the last parts I needed was a replacement lens piece for front of the system.  The one I had was in really good shape except for a rather prominent crack in the upper left corner.  It didn't cover any of the visible part of the screen, but my OCD just wouldn't let it go.  In searching around for where I might source a replacement, I came across several mentions that Best Electronics still sells replacements for $20.  The newest of those posts was from 2014.  I wasn't sure if they would still have any of the screen lenses in stock, so I sent them an email.

Email conversations with Best Electronics is something of a trip.  If you scroll down to the bottom of their home page, there's rather a lengthy diatribe about SPAM and the formatting of email inquiries.  That in itself is a little strange, but the fun really begins when the conversation starts.  Firstly, they seem to bounce the messages through multiple mailboxes - some in front of the SPAM filters, and some evidently behind.  I received a reply from a different email address and some explanation about Yahoo mail being blocked etc...  Since their filters reject any message beginning with "Re:" or "Fw:", they prepend the outgoing subject with "More" instead.

When you send them a message they attempt to fit it into a Q&A format.  Though a little weird, I found it to be very refreshing because it provides evidence that they actually read your message for comprehension.

For example, I sent something to the effect of:

Hello,

Do you have any replacement clear screen covers for Lynx II, and if so please quote me a price.

And they replied with something like:

Dear Customer Person,

Q: "Do you have any Lynx II screen covers"
A: "Yes we have those"

I'm paraphrasing of course, but you get the idea.  It took a couple more messages for me to actually get pricing from them, and to my dismay the price had lept up to $35 for the replacement screen.  But when you're the only source left, you can kinda get away with charging what you want.  That's almost as much as I paid for the Lynx II I was modding, but I eventually convinced myself it was worth it to get a perfect brand new screen cover.

When the part arrived I realized immediately that it was not the brand new part I thought it was, but a used part.  It was in pretty good condition, but for $35 it should have been flawless, and it wasn't.

When I reached out to them to ask if it could be replaced with an actual new one, they evoked the 34+ Year Atari tech (lol), and explained that the Stig had personally pulled that screen from a brand new defective Lynx II, and that all of the "new" parts were gone.  While it may have technically been "brand new defective", given the scratches on it, it was not "uncirculated".

They continued to respond in the Q&A format even when it ceased to make sense, and offered a refund.   Of course they were not going to pay for the shipping, so I would have been out something like $14 and still left with a cracked screen cover, so I decided to keep it, but I'll probably never deal with them again after that experience.

ViewEra V220D-B Monitor Repair Notes

A little over a year ago, my ViewEra V220D-B monitor started struggling to wake up out of power-save mode.  At first it would take a few seconds to come on, then it would take minutes and pretty soon it simply wouldn't come on at all.  This a classic case of spent capacitors.

According to my NewEgg order history I bought that monitor 11 years ago in 2007.  It doesn't even go up to 1080p.  Over the years it ended up front-ending secondary and tertiary computers that I barely used.  When it finally quit altogether, I stashed it in a corner and it stayed there for at least a year gathering dust.

It's customary when an old monitor goes out to use that event as an excuse to buy a new one with better features and chuck the old one in the bin.  Given that and the age of this thing I think the odds against someone stumbling across this post and finding it useful are astronomical.  But I've never been a fan of wastefulness, and if a perfectly serviceable bench monitor can be had for a couple of dollars worth of capacitors, they why not give it a shot?

Taking the thing apart was a bit of a chore.  There are three screws in back along the bottom - the middle one hidden in the center of a foil sticker.  However the back is actually held on by about two dozen tension clips that have to be carefully pried apart (I used one of those Lego pry-tools as a spudger to do it).

Once I got it apart, the problem was immediately obvious - four 1000uF 25v capacitors in the center of the power board were clearly swollen. (The capacitors in the yellow box in the image below are the replacements.)  The bottom side of the board was coated in yellow-brown syrupy electrolytic fluid that had leaked from the dead capacitors.  I happened to have a handful of capacitors with the right specs, so I cleaned the board, swapped out the bad capacitors and put everything back together. (The capacitors were attached to the board and the linear power regulators with gray epoxy - I'm not an electrical engineer, but I think doing that would transfer more heat from the regulators into the capacitors and cause them to fail prematurely - planned obsolecence?)

When I plugged the monitor in, I saw the familiar "Searching for Signal" box pop up for a few seconds, then, since I didn't have anything plugged in, it was followed by the "Power Saving..." box.  Up to that point I thought "Yay, it works again!". Then instead of going dark and powering down, the screen went completely white - lit up as brightly as it would go.  If I hit the "source" button, the screen would go mostly black, display the "Searching for Signal", then "Power Saving..." then back to a completely white screen.

With a video source plugged in, the monitor worked perfectly normally - it displayed a nice clear bright picture with no problems, but the minute I tried to power it off, or the PC went to sleep, or the DVI cable was unplugged - bright white screen.

My first clue as to what was wrong was that when the screen went white, it didn't just "snap to" white.  The whiteness would spread across the screen like a ripple - as though the blackness was "draining" out of it along the edges.  Since the LCD works by darkening the screen in front of a florescent backlight, it made sense that what I was seeing was the LCD turn transparent as the power drained from it - the LCD was properly shutting down, but the backlight was staying constantly lit.

I took the monitor back apart to re-check everything - make sure I hadn't dropped some solder somewhere, or created a bridge somewhere.  I de-soldered and checked a couple of other capacitors but everything checked out fine.  Then I decided to completely strip the thing back down to give it a thorough cleaning and that's when I found what I had done wrong.

The power board has a 5-conductor wire harness connecting it to the backlight ballast board. This is the red box in the image below.  On the backlight board, this 5-conductor harness connects a 5-conductor plug to a 5-conductor socket.  What I did not notice is that on the power board side, the 5-conductor harness connects a 5-conductor plug to a 6-conductor socket.  When I had first plugged it back in after replacing the capacitors, I simply lined the plug up with the bottom of the socket and pressed in. From that angle, it appeared to fully populate the socket, though in fact the top pin was unconnected.  When I noticed this, I switched the position of that plug so that the bottom pin was unconnected, and viola! the monitor works like it should - shutting off the backlight when appropriate.  Thankfully the plug and socket were designed in such a way that connecting it wrong didn't burn anything out.

In Red: the correct orientation of the backlight plug, with the plug aligned to the top of the socket so that the bottom pin is unconnected.  In Yellow: the location of the four capacitors which had gone bad.

Of all the lazy engineering, this one really took the cake.  It's not the first time I've seen a wire harness with fewer conductors than the socket, but normally the plug will still match the socket to prevent exactly this sort of thing - the unused pin just won't be connected to anything.