It is a well-known reality of rescuing certain older electronic devices that, at some point, you’re likely going to have to replace a busted capacitor. This is the stage [Kevin] is at in the 3rd installment in his saga of reviving a 50-year-old Military Tektronix oscilloscope.
[Kevin] recently discovered a failed capacitor in the power supply for this vintage analog scope. Having identified and removed the culprit, it was time to find a way to replace the faulty component with a modern equivalent. The original capacitor is out of fashion to the degree that a perfect replacement would be impractical and likely not desirable. This job would call for a bit of adaptation.
Starting with the recently desoldered pads on the power supply board as a template, [Kevin] walks us through his process of transferring his meticulously acquired measurements to KiCAD for the purpose of creating an adapter PCB. Once the original pads are mapped, he then draws in pads matching the leads of the new component, referencing the manufacturer’s schematic of the replacement part.
With everything drawn in place and design rule checks satisfied, it’s a quick turnaround from the PCB fabricator before this Tektronix scope moves one step closer to happy tracing again.
While the end product of this kludge is about as simple of a PCB as you might imagine, [Kevin’s] documentation is a thorough tutorial on the process for retrofitting components via adapter boards, covering some of the subtleties that you might miss if you’ve never been through it before.
We are looking forward to the next installment of Kevin’s undertaking. In the meantime, you can delve into other oscilloscope repair projects, here, here and here, or go deep on why capacitors fail as in the capacitor plague of the early 2000s (though these are not the same vintage or necessarily the same reason for failure as in [ Kevin’s ] device).
This articles is written by : Nermeen Nabil Khear Abdelmalak
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