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Topics - curtjr4

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Local Forecast / "The WeatherSTAR" - Waking up the old beast...
« on: June 21, 2020, 05:56:49 PM »
Well, this is something that I've been wanting to do a write-up on for quite some time... the journey of my WeatherSTAR III/3000 units and, well, I guess my Juniors as well -- although, the Juniors aren't the primary focus of this forum post. If you like reading about old hardware, or just like these older analog STARs, this post will likely be your cup of tea! I start off with a little history of how I got the units, how we got the band together, some technical information and how we got to where we are today.

Background
The journey with my pair of III units dates back to summer of 2010. Martin had mentioned to me that he found some old WeatherStar's for sale, but wasn't going to purchase them. Some of you may remember that he posted some pictures of the units on here almost a decade ago to this day... so I went ahead and purchased the pair from a CATV outfit from Pennsylvania. The units have definitely seen quite a bit of use, with one of them having PCBs that were pretty dirty. Compressed air wouldn't do the trick... had to be cleaned with isopropyl alcohol.


Picture of the pair that I purchased. Martin posted this picture almost a decade ago on these forums. The top is a WeatherSTAR III with the translucent faceplate, and the bottom appears to be an original WeatherSTAR from the channels launch, upgraded all the way to a STAR III. The bottom unit has a date stamp hidden on the rear of the face plate that says November 19, 1981. 

I did a little bit of tinkering with them through the years, but really they were what everyone perceived them to be... doorstops! They could power on, I could run video through them... I could also manipulate the local sensors using resistors on the appropriate terminals on the rear. Other than that, they just sat there to look pretty.

The venture of getting these machines to truly run began about a year and a half ago, in very late 2018/early 2019. This is where stuff gets fun... initially, we were reverse engineering the WeatherSTAR Junior as everyone in the group had one, but our groups electronics engineer hit a bit of a snafu with understanding the logic. There is a CPLD (complex programmable logic device) on board handling the subcarrier data, which threw a major wrench into the project in regards to generating FSK data to drive the machines. The CPLD, while very useful for the original engineers, obfuscated how the data was being processed, so this is where the STAR III came into play. The III is fairly primitive, and all of the electronics are in your face. No obfuscation, no crazy programmable logic chips... everything is in your face. Thanks to the STAR III... we unlocked the keys to the kingdom, so to say. It was now possible to understand how the III and Jr expect data so we could properly feed it live weather information, just like it used to!

STAR III Awakens, with some troubles...

With us now generating our own (modified) UK Teletext frames, we are able to address the units and send them "pages". The pages are what we know as products, so the current conditions product is its own page, local hourly observations is its own page, etc.


The WeatherSTAR III displaying the "Forecast Across the Region" product in 2020.

This was a really cool moment. The WeatherSTAR III was discontinued in the United States in 2004 due to how the warning buzzer circuit operated. The buzzer circuit its self is interesting as, for some reason, it will continuously beep and beep and beep, and won't stop for almost 30 seconds. Annoying, right? Yeah. It's very annoying. Here's a video of the III doing its alert tone goofiness, after fixing a major issue with the alert crawl as explained later in this post... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3t05I9WryM0

Another issue that was stumbled upon was a weak power supply, causing characters on the screen to artifact really badly. A clip of that can be seen here, once the crawl starts... https://youtu.be/WXZNTrkLXCM?t=105

So... how did I fix this problem? Well. I had two options here... I could either adapt a modern ATX computer power supply to the STAR III, which would be nice because it can detect faults, or I could rebuild the original linear power supply! To keep the unit original, I opted to just recap the power supply... after doing so, the crawl quit glitching and I felt much more confident about running the unit.


A before shot of the power supply. You can see that the smaller green capacitors are bulging on the PCB.


Annnddd... afterwards with all new capacitors. I also touched up some of the traces on the back of the PCB, and cleaned up old flux.


The original battery pack that shipped with the unit. Surprisingly, they actually keep data retained for about 10-15 seconds with no power going to the unit. Somewhat amazing for 40 year old batteries...


The refreshed power supply reassembled into the chassis.

The other issue I was having was the system effectively running out of memory during a severe weather alert, which would cause all sorts of cool party tricks! The alert scroll text would become garbled, often times briefly repeating the beginning of the alert text, and it would change the time of day line on the LDL to whatever background color is set during the alert. So if there is a tornado warning, the line with the date and time will turn red. Or brown during a watch or an advisory. This one was a bit painful for me to watch, so I tried two different things. First, I replaced all of the 6116 SRAM chips on the STAR III Control board, and the 6116 SRAM on the STAR III Data board. I initially tested the chips against my EEPROM programmer... but the test wasn't actually keeping data in the memory. It'd bring the Vcc pin low, effectively clearing any written data. I just opted to replace the chips at this point... and it's always good to have spares.


Some (new to me) SRAM chips on the STAR III Control board.

At this point, as the issue was still proudly in front of my face, I opted to max out the system on SRAM. While the RAM can't be easily expanded on the control board... the data board was engineered for larger SRAM chips. In this case, I swapped out the 6116 for a 6264 SRAM chip. After buying some SOJ chips on the first go on accident, I ordered the proper DIP package and got the new chip installed. Problem still exists!

Finally, we bit the bullet and accepted that the SRAM couldn't be expanded (easily, at least), and all of the pages were being stored on the control boards memory. To stop this buffer overrun when sending alerts causing all sorts of goofy issues... we just had to rearrange the pages to ensure that they were not exceeding teletext page 52. In the middle of page 52, the system runs out of addressable memory.

Here's a video of the really goofy alert crawl issues I was experiencing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEN_YqbVs3w

In conclusion...
This has been a very interesting project, with a lot of great minds behind making the STAR III, STAR Jr, and STAR 4000 live once again. I'd like to thank Techknight for his electronics experience, as well as others on this forum who won't be named without their permission. I'm absolutely stoked to have these older systems running again, with them being almost 40 years old!


A Jr and the III running in my equipment rack.


Another shot, but without the face plate on.


The STAR III playing a forecast with an animated background in June of 2020. You can watch the LF here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13gfT-m4kCI

I hope you all enjoyed this. Feel free to ask questions, and comment! I'd love to read some feedback from the community :) I tried keeping this short so if there's anything you would like me to talk about in depth, just ask.

2
WeatherSTAR Tech Support / San Luis Obispo, CA IntelliStar frozen
« on: October 07, 2014, 12:29:19 AM »
Hello STAR Team, if you all still lurk around here. Haven't seen any activity from you guys in quite a while.

IntelliStar 23782 of San Luis Obispo, CA has been frozen since 9:58 AM pacific time. It is now 9:26 PM, and it is still frozen.

I'll attach a picture of where it's frozen. The cable company is Charter Communications, channel 39.

Thanks!

3
WeatherSTAR Tech Support / San Luis Obispo, CA IntelliStar 2 - LDA error
« on: November 13, 2013, 05:15:19 AM »
Hopefully this is just a bug in the latest release instead of being localized to the unit... but here's the problem. The sidebar is showing local information for San Luis Obispo (tides, UV information, all of that). While thats displaying, the bottom bar doesn't come up and is showing the national weather conditions.

Channel 763
Charter Communications
San Luis Obispo, CA ZIP 93401

4
Local Forecast / IntelliStar I and II Update planned
« on: September 07, 2012, 05:30:27 PM »
Not sure if there is a thread out there already, but here's what I know. TWC is rolling out a software update (sounds like a hardware update as well) March 5th, 2013 to select units, and will be rolling it out nationwide on March 19th, 2013. Here's the statement I got from TWC:

Quote
In an ongoing effort to constantly improve the quality of our products, The Weather Channel is testing a new format of Local on the 8s. We are modernizing our equipment, and this new look is the first phase in building a superior programming model that is compatible with our HD Intellistar 2 and SD Intellistar boxes, delivering an improved customer experience. The testing of the new format will commence Monday, March 5th, with plans to roll out on a permanent basis two weeks later.

Wonder if this means that more changes are ahead... :thinking:

5
Everything Else Classic TWC / TWC and Hurricane Fran
« on: June 13, 2011, 02:16:52 AM »
Hello everyone,
I found an old VHS tape that had a lot of footage from Hurricane Fran (I was in this hurricane with my family in Wilmington, NC... where the eye of the storm hit). On this tape, there were a few times when you would see TWC. Well, I am sad to say that there wasn't an LF that was recorded. But, I do have graphics, OCMs, etc., and the WeatherStar 4000s warning crawl. Here's the pictures :D

6
WeatherSTAR Tech Support / 22842 not working?
« on: March 05, 2011, 01:42:21 AM »
Hello STAR Team,
STAR 22842 (Comcast of East Lansing, MI) does not appear to be working. I have been getting the forecast from 22840 (Comcast of Lansing, MI) for the past few days... so I was curious as to what is going on. I'm starting to get confused because the conditions here can be pretty different from the ones in Lansing... so I can never get accurate information for the conditions.

Thanks!

7
WeatherSTAR Tech Support / STAR 22842 Request
« on: January 16, 2011, 08:31:50 PM »
Hi STAR team,

I was curious if the almanac could be modified a little bit. I think it would be beneficial if we see the moon phases, as well as the temperature data. STAR ID 27098 could be used as a example.

Thank you STAR team for taking the time to read and consider this request :yes:

8
Your Local Weather / Ingham County, MI Weather
« on: June 06, 2010, 01:04:39 AM »
Wow! Tonight so far was very busy. We got a Tornado Warning, Tornado Watch, some Flash Flooding, and Severe T'Storms. It's wild :thrilled: I love weather so much. I have recordings of the IntelliStar activating the Tornado Warnings LDL, I have the EAS Bulletin, and tons of stupid programming that TWC... I mean... NBC airs :footinmouth:

9
TWC and your Cable Company / ATT U-Verse and STARs...
« on: April 25, 2010, 08:57:29 PM »
Some of you know that I am probaly switching over to U-Verse because of money conflicts. But, I know that they do not carry and STARs... Not one. Not a XL, 4000, Jr, or iStar. It's disapointing. I don't want to go long without a local forecast :cry:

The folks over at the ATT forums were no help. They just came up with excuses (Well, the majority of them). http://utalk.att.com/t5/TV-Programming/The-Weather-Channel-Local-Conditions/td-p/217415

I really wish that they would carry STARs. Well, does anyone know for a fact if they have some STARs at some locations? Since what I heard was that they don't.

Cheers,
Curt :hmm:

10
Emulator Videos / Curt's Emulations!
« on: April 25, 2010, 04:13:35 AM »
W00T, I am starting to make emulations :biggrin: Well, here is my best one. I have another one, but has a few problems with queing. (I know the warning screen and the LDL on the warning screen looks crappy, but please, watch the LF! It's really good to me and other people :) )

WeatherStar Jr D Flavor and Tornado warning


Features: Malibu by Eddie Reasoner (At least, I do believe it was him).

I wan't ideas for ad crawls. If anyone has suggestions, post them here or PM me ;)

11
Local Forecast / WeatherSTAR I/II/III Unit?
« on: April 16, 2010, 05:55:50 PM »
Hello everyone...
I was wondering if anyone has saw (even in a picture) what the STAR I/II/III unit looked like. I can find no pictures anywhere and want to know what it looks like. I have been wondering this for a long time, so a responce is appreciated  :thumbsup:

-Curt

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Local Forecast / LDL Ads (Suggestion)
« on: April 14, 2010, 03:43:12 PM »
Ok, so I saw that the time was added to the IntelliStar LDL it's self. I think it's a great step up, but, I was wondering... would it be possible to make the LDL come up in full (So the National LDL section wont show), and just send the ad to the IntelliStar and it will show it on the IntelliStars LDL? Since personaly, I think it looks a bit funny with the two different backgrounds  :hmm:

-Curt

13
Contributions / Curt's Contributions
« on: June 27, 2009, 03:59:14 AM »
Well, I've decided to start posting some things here for people to use. Here is a desktop background I made (1024x768) with a TWC logo, and the old TWC Slogan, "Live By It." on the bottom left corner of the image :)

Note: The main background image was found on the Google Search Engine. All rights to the image taker are acknowledged.

14
Hello everyone! (I hope this is in the appropriate forum)

The East Lansing intellistar unit (22842) may be decommisioned due to a faulty graphics card (This is what I think). The star simply won't output any video at all. No commercials, no programming, no bumpers, no LFs... nothing. The star is turned on since I can hear the audio.

Note: The only other logical reson on why there is no video is due to a loose cable... but I think they would have noticed by now ;)

15
General Discussion / CPU Upgrade... What would you recomend?
« on: May 10, 2009, 01:19:19 PM »
Hello everyone,

I am in need up a CPU upgrade... badly. I am running on a old AMD Duron. Information is listed below. The socket of this CPU is a Socket 462 (Socket A).

Applebred (Model 8, 130 nm)
L1-Cache: 64 + 64 KiB (Data + Instructions)
L2-Cache: 64 KiB, fullspeed
MMX, Extended MMX, 3DNow!, Extended 3DNow!, SSE
Socket A (EV6)
Front side bus: 133 MHz (266 MT/s)
VCore: 1.50 V
First release: August 21, 2003
Clockrate: 1400, 1600, 1800 MHz

Any upgrade suggestions (And yes, I do know that upgrading on this socket is difficult, as there arn't many CPUs on the market designed for this specific Socket 462).

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