The Struggle

[Tom Droege <tdroege@veriomail.com>]

The last several days have been spent trying to increase the stack of 
completely checked out stamp scanner boards.  It has been a struggle.

Somewhere in the middle of the operation, the memory board I was using for 
test died.  Well, it did not completely die.  It sort of worked.  But the 
computer gave signals like, "No Keyboard Connected", "CMOS Memory Failure" 
, Boot Disk Failure, etc..  The data was just funny noise.

It would appear that there may be a bad electrolytic capacitor on the 
board.  In any case, everything I tried to test failed.  Eventually I moved 
to another computer.  I had the bad luck to move the bad memory board to 
the new computer and so I got the same results.

It is always a struggle to get things going when you do not know which 
board is the bad one.  It is not so easy to test these boards.  I just do 
system tests.  It would be a real pain to build proper test fixtures.

In any case, I am now making progress.  I have three good Stamp/Scanners in 
the stack, and one in the bad stack.  When I get to 5 or 6 I will mail out 
the replacement boards to Michael and Arne.

Tom Droege