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Diagnosing video signal loss on Wii and GBS-Control

Adventures in programming, hardware, DSP, and chiptune

The scope randomly fails to recognize or save waveforms to USB flash drives, especially when you've caught that one trace of an event that happens every few hours, and its CSV export excludes all but 1 channel by default and takes multiple minutes to complete. In hindsight, getting a real oscilloscope (though perhaps not this one) was the right decision, since the CXADC's sampling rate would not have been enough to resolve the 12 ns time delay of a signal traveling across 96 inches of shielded RCA cable serving as a luma extension cord. My GBS-Control in a homemade flimsy plastic case, now with a Noctua NF-A4x10 5V cooling fan plugged into the 5V power supply and blowing on the heatsink.Reviewing my notes from the investigation, I'm struck with how many dead ends (researching expensive and ill-suited current clamps, hooking a coaxial cable to two non-ground signals, trying to read non-CSV formats on a PC) and roadblocks I hit along the way, and how much ambiguity I found in my own observations.

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