Breathing new life into a Thomson Sky+ HD box

We’ve had a Sky+ HD box for the last 4 years and it has served us well until about a year ago when we started to notice intermittent problems such as not being able to receive certain channels at times, occasional failed recordings and picture break up. This progressively got worse to the point where we could only receive a handful of HD channels and recordings would fail regularly.

After a bit of Google research it became apparent that a major cause of problems with these Thomson DSI8125 Sky+ HD boxes is a failure of the on-board PSU. The numerous capacitors used on the PSU were not of a particularly good quality and are prone to failing over time.

(It’s worth pointing out that I upgraded the stock 320GB hard drive to a new 1TB drive about 2 years ago but from what I’ve read I don’t think this contributed to the problem at all)

Luckily there are repair kits available which allow you to replace the failed capacitors with new, high quality replacements. One supplier of these kits which I’d read good reports about is Satcure. So, I ordered a component kit from them for the very reasonable price of £10.95, found a local electrical repairer to do the upgrade for £20 and we now have a fully functioning and rock solid Sky+ HD box again.

Announcing a new arrival… I now have a Raspberry Pi

After following the development of the Raspberry Pi single board computer for several months, I was lucky enough to be one of the first to be able to place an order for one of the original batch of 10,000 when they were launched in February…

…And mine arrived in the post today!

All I’ve had chance to do so far is install the initial Debian Squeeze distribution on a spare SD card and boot it up connected to my 50″ plasma screen with a keyboard, mouse and Ethernet cable attached. It worked flawlessly and booted in about 10 seconds.

Once I’ve had time to have a play with it some more I’ll post again with an update. But for now, all I wanted to say was I’VE GOT ONE OF THE FIRST RASPBERRY PIS!!!