"Arfa Daily" wrote in message
news
Is it just me, or does everyone else hate working from electronic service
manuals? Yes, I know that it's very convenient to be able to download
manuals from manufacturers, and to be able to trade them around, but boy,
do they make our life hard, or what ?

Today, I have been working on a Pioneer semi pro mixer desk. The manual is
on CDROM and is 176 pages long, so not practical to print the whole thing
out. It has been created using 'virtual A4' sheets, so the many big
complex diagrams, such as the DSP board, have been spread across multiple
disconnected pages. Helpfully (Ha!) they have put little diagrams at the
left side of the sheets to indicate that what you are looking at is a big
sheet, that they've kindly rendered into little sheets for you ...

So as well as having to follow signal and power lines between 'real'
pages, as you would have to in a paper manual, but which was easy to do,
because it told you exactly where to go looking for the line's carry-on,
you also have to follow these lines across broken up sheets, with little
indication as to where you will find the carry-on. All in all, I wasted
about an hour and a half, staring at a computer screen, zooming,
de-zooming, rotating and printing individual bits of the schematics and
layouts, just to work out where a couple of supply rails had disappeared
to on the DSP board. If this had been a proper Pioneer paper manual, the
whole exercise would have been trivial, taking perhaps 15 minutes total.
Who pays for this wasted time ?

The initial problem is a couple of s.m. fuses that are open. Of course,
they are specials, so I have now got to go back to the manual to try to
find part numbers for them. There is also a problem with the VFD not
illuminating now that I have (tempoarily) restored the missing rails, so I
suppose there is now going to have to be another lengthy session, trying
to sort out the appropriate bits of schematic to get to the bottom of this
fault ...

Sorry lads. rant over ... :-)

Arfa



When done right they are great. I can access them on my iphone, or do
searches for component locations, etc. When they are nothing more than a
scan to jpeg, they are a PITA.

Leonard