EZTrak DISPLAY

[dominicmarceau]

I'm having an intermitent trouble with one of our EzTrak display (9" monochrome). It goes blank with a vertical line, seems like the Hsync is going dead either on the videocard or the monitor.

Has anyone fixed such trouble in the past ?
How?
What is the display (PC board and monitor) standard / type ?

Other suggestions...

Thanks
Dominic.

[riverrat]

we have lost monitors on almost all of our ez series machines.
what we have done is to replace them with standard desktop
monitors. if you do this make sure to run a bead of silicone
around the monitor where it meets the plastic case, to keep
coolant out.

[dominicmarceau]

Thanks for the cue, t wasa one of my option, but noticed it's a B&W monitor with a DB15 connection... would a VGA monitor works ? What type of monitor have you used ?

Thanks
Dominic.

[riverrat]

vga should work, the control in the ez series machines are based on
386 or 486 pc's "never seen a pentium one" also the video card
should be standard off of the shelf, for an older pc of course.
we just bought 15 reconditioned dell monitors from our network
guy for 25.00 ea.
hope this helps.

[sdopp]

vga monitor works fine. we just use the smallest one we could find (cheaper the beater) now you can program in living color, red white and blue

[NC Cams]

Some Gateway color monitors have been known to have issues with generic driver cards - we went nuts trying to figure that one out. Simply using an NEC monitor in place of the Gateway fixed it.

We too have replaced our hanging monitor with a 17" desktop "recycled" monitor that rests comfortably on our B&D shop mate portable vise stand. Makes for nice easy INEXPENSIVE repair of the horribly overpriced bolt-in service unit from EMI.

Actually, the OEM piece was a hacked B&W monitor - ours still had part of the original case attached where they "surgically modified" (hacked it at the factory) to get it to fit.

There is a link on the 'Zone someplace on a way to replace the factory monitor with an aftermarket LCD - real neat/sanitary remedy.

[riverrat]

no dought, nc cams, emi parts are stupid expensive for what they are,
but,,,,, the guys who started that show are former bridgeport engineers,
and are more than happy to give tech support.
which is priceless.
deal with ona edm, now that is some poooor support, beatiful machine
very accurate, terrible support.

[sdopp]

NC CAMS
I found the same hack job on one of our eztraks can't believe BP stooped that low.

[NC Cams]

There is a BIG difference between "support" and charging highly inflated prices for essentially generic hardware.

Example: the last price quoted for the EXCHANGE of a BMDC card from EMI was well in excess of $2000. This is for essentially now obsolete early/mid 90's discrete component PCB's. A bit of research shows that, asside from some burned PROM's (easily copied anymore), the board hardware can be obtained for $200 (or much less as we found) as the exact same parts are either obsolete or surplus and thus dirt cheap.

The only real "issue" is to do a PCB layout and, with today's readily available software, even multilayer boards can be created quite inexpensively. Supposedly, the BMDC boards are pretty much interchangeable - even EMI admits that. Hence, if they DID engineer the system and have the "rights" as they claim, they should be able to offer a reasonably priced DIY or OEM "plug and play" service board for a quite reasonable profit (50% profit margin, 100% mark up) and STILL be cheaper than the $2K plus that they want for a used, repaired, exchanged board that is perhaps 10 years old or so.

I don't mind paying for "service". However there is a difference between even premium service and even the perception of being gouged.