OT: Corghi Wheel Balancer dead?

Hi All,

I ask here as I believe some of you work in / with the trade and may have some experience with such things.

A mate has an old CRT Corghi Wheel Balancer and it's been killed by a power surge of some sort. He has had someone out to look at it and the garbled message I was given was summat along the lines of 'you could stand an ordinary PC beside it and use that instead' (Instead of paying them £1200 to fix it 'officially' etc). I don't know any more than that and have no idea what does or doesn't work when you power it up etc.

I did have a quick look in the back and it looks like a an open frame CRT and what could be a CGA / EGA (analogue 9 pin 'D' type) connection going from the CRT to the 'system board'.

Now, if it is just an analogue (or composite) monitor I guess he might find one on eBay / Freecycle but if it's more than that it could be wasted effort. I suggested that if it was just the monitor it could possibly be fixed by a TV engineer, if there were still any about that is. ;-(

So, does anyone here have any experience of the insides of these things please and if so any thoughts on the options?

Cheers, T i m.

Reply to
T i m
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Nope. But the experienced would probably like a model name and number.

So wire a PC to the serial port and run a terminal session.

Any 9 or 25-way D-type connectors around the back?

Reply to
Adrian C

Ok, I'll see what I can do.

I did think of that ... what could a 'basic PC' do externally etc. I guess the burnt-in graphics image (a large circle) on the CRT put me off that scent a bit.

To be fair it was knee deep in crap in there and I didn't stay that long (not really my 'thing' as such) so no, I didn't see any but when I pop in I'll get them to put the airline over it and I'll have a closer look.

Cheers, T i m

Reply to
T i m

I've no idea about this kit. I'd assume that we're talking about something like a VT100 terminal and I'd tend to go with what Adrian suggests. It may be that the balancer controller is DTE in which case you may need a null modem cable/adapter to connect to a PC - other than that it's just a case of matching baud, bits, parity etc.

Cheers, Mark

Reply to
marpate1

You and me both then. ;-)

Well whilst it could be the burn-in on the screen looks more like that of a video display than a terminal as such (not that you can't paint some graphics with terminals etc).

Yup, (ex Datacomms Eng here), no probs with that and I've still got an old V.24 breakout box somewhere, just it's all a bit vague and getting any info out of them is like blood stone etc.

I asked them if it started up 'like Windows" to see if it was just an app sitting on top of Windows (as I noticed with a pool game in a local kebab shop the other day when they turned it on it runs on W98!) but he said not, they just turned it on and it was there. I did see the edge of what could either be an old all_in_one motherboard (and had the DB9 output that went to the monitor [1]) or some dedicated controller of some sort. There was also a module that plugged into the front like a big games cart (on a DB37 connector or similar), that could either be the firmware on a ROM or some sort of personality module?

The problem is getting back to the facts ... did the engineer say it was a dead monitor or what.

I'll see if I can get more info though and I guess I was hoping that someone here might have played with one and could tell me. ;-)

Cheers, T i m

[1] From memory it only had 4 pins populating the DB9 so I don't think it could be CGA so may have been a MGA but I think even that uses 5 pins?
Reply to
T i m

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