Re: Super Serial Card help

[jim@magrathea.plus.com (jim)]

Michael Black <et472@FreeNet.Carleton.CA> wrote:

> > Ah. I _think_ I may have found the problem. Capacitor C13 looks like it
> > may have been damaged - the top looks knocked and there's a wee hint of
> > metal there.
> > 
> But that's only relevant if the capacitor is important.
> 
> A board tends to have lots of bypass capacitors, and missing one or a few
> may not affect operation, certainly shouldn't cause a total failure.
> 
> There won't be much in the way of non-bypass capacitors on a serial board,
> there just isn't any need for them.  The only exception would be if there's
> an onboard crystal oscillator for  baud timing, there would be one or two
> capacitors around the crystal, and maybe if one of those were missing there'd
> be a problem (since it might not oscillate, or it might possibly oscillate
> too far from the needed frequency to cause problems (though that's only
> slightly possible).

That's good to know. One thing I _did_ see last night was that when I
switched the //e on, a single character (a '?') got sent. Well, one
appeared on the machine at the other end of the cable. That sort of
implies that the card _may_ be okay, but is just misconfigured somehow.

Or it could be just mostly dead, I suppose.

Jim
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