Toppy.org.uk

[Luftube]

Hi I'm a new member although ive had my Toppy for about 5 years now I have just had my first problem with it, the playback of some recordings sometimes jump or freeze. Ive read the posts about this fault and have checked the voltages they seem to be within spec (all the capacitors are black ones), so i decided to fit a fan as descibed in some of the posts this is now working but when I switch to standby the fan is still running, its conected to the 12v supply with a resistor in to slow it down.
Is this normal and if so is there a solution, would connecting to the 5v supply without a resistor do the trick or is it better not to use the 5v side.

[andyfras]

Firmware 5.14.09T doesn't go into true standby. You could go back to 5.13.65T and use the MyStuff TAP to provide series record (and a lot more).

Did you connect the fan to the disk supply, i.e. the feed from the mainboard?

[Luftube]

yes I used a male to female hard drive power plug with a breakout fan lead on the 12v side.
Ive read on some of the posts that owners have modified this breakout lead so its connected to th 5v side, but they dont say if it switches it off in standby.

[juwlz]

As Andy said, on that firmware, your Toppy never really goes into standby.

[Luftube]

Thanks for your promt reply. I fitted the fan because I noticed that the freezing of playback gets worse as the night goes on and to test if it was heat related I unpluged the toppy for about half an hour then returned to the same point in the recording that was freezing, it played out the rest of the film (about half an hour) with out any problem.
One thing I have noticed which could be significant is that when the hard drive is doing some work like playback or timeshift the speed of the new cooling fan drops a little, do you think this indicates the power supply is struggling to provide enough power when its under load.

[andyfras]

I think that your Toppy needs some new PSU capacitors rather than a fan. I suspect that C25 (the tall green one) will have a domed top.

[alan_m]

Hi I'm a new member although ive had my Toppy for about 5 years now I have just had my first problem with it, the playback of some recordings sometimes jump or freeze. Ive read the posts about this fault and have checked the voltages they seem to be within spec (all the capacitors are black ones), so i decided to fit a fan as descibed in some of the posts this is now working but when I switch to standby the fan is still running, its conected to the 12v supply with a resistor in to slow it down.
Is this normal and if so is there a solution, would connecting to the 5v supply without a resistor do the trick or is it better not to use the 5v side.

A 5 year old Toppy will start having PSU problems - usually cheap to fix.
Did you check ALL of the voltages?
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Topfield_5800/PSU_Repair


When Freeview + came along Topfield had to adapt older hardware and software to support the new Freeview standard. They didn't make too good a job of it and the solution they adopted was to keep the Toppy powered all of the time in order to pick up new broadcast information. This means that the box only goes into a pretend standby where the 12V and 5V power supplies remain on all of the time. This also means the box runs hotter for longer than one with a true standby. This speeds up the failure of the capacitors in th PSU

To get a true standby (and the fans turning off) you have to revert back to older firmware but you will then lose some of the native Freeview + functions. However with this approach all is not lost.
i) the Toppy Freeview+ firmware still has a lot of bugs
http://forum.toppy.org.uk/forum/viewtop ... 549#160549
ii) as a minimum, it is advisable to run some TAPs to make your Toppy more reliable.
iii) There is a TAPs that replaces the native Toppy interface and give you all of the Freeview+ functionality - providing a much more powerful implementation of the functionality. TAPs such as Mystuff run on the older firmware.

I would recommend installing older firmware and the Mystuff TAP. There is an Windows installer that will do both (and also automatically install a lot of useful support TAPs).
The Mystuff installer, which also installs firmware, can be found at
http://www.toppy.org.uk/~mystuff/cgi/Downloads.cgi


Youtube has some videos demonstrating Mystuff
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFjk_SCrMFk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nVUMXKjya4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpS0UsP_g0c


Before using the installer it may be worth downloading and installing Antares on you PC
http://haselgrove.id.au/antares/

[alan_m]

I think that your Toppy needs some new PSU capacitors rather than a fan. I suspect that C25 (the tall green one) will have a domed top.

I agree, the more likely cause of problems is the PSU. A fan will keep a working box 10 to 15C cooler than an un-modified box and perhaps improve future reliability.

[Luftube]

Thanks for the info, I was thinking of replacing the capacitors after reading all the posts on the subject i didnt realise they wore out untill I started reading the forum and that a faulty PSU could cause so much damage to other more expensive parts.
Iwill get in touch with Andy for a capacitor kit, Ive read quite a few of the excellent articals with step by step instructions for this job and I think I could manage it with the guidance from these articals.

Thanks again