Author here. Unfortunately after removing the wall switch, I found a newly installed mini-fridge would cause signal dropouts sometimes when the motor started or stopped. Moving it into an adjacent room reduced the frequency of dropouts, but I still got them periodically (and can no longer hear the mini-fridge to tell if dropouts are correlated). A few weeks ago I unplugged the mini-fridge because I barely used it and it had filled with ice. Since then I have not gotten any dropouts (aside from static shocks in my room), but haven't played my Wii long enough to know with confidence it won't happen again.
I don't have any power isolators, UPSes, or similar. My first thought was to swap the power supply or console, but I don't have an easy way to do either one without paying for one-time components I won't have a good use for afterwards (I could sell a Wii on eBay, but have never sold there before).
I know a lot of the words here, but most of it sounds like gibberish. I wish I had the expertise and domain knowledge to be able to do something like this. It was a fantastic read and I'm awed by the author's dedication and level of knowledge.
Unfortunately, as an enterprise software developer, my hardware proficiency stops at being able to assemble PCs and diagnose simple hardware issues (is this power supply broken?) at a very abstract level. I've encountered issues like this before and lacked the expertise to properly diagnose it on a low enough level, which can be frustrating.
If you have some free time you could always try taking up electronics as a hobby. Learn about Ohm’s law and circuits, KVL/KCL, test equipment such as multimeters and oscilloscopes, alternating current, capacitors and inductors, relationships between frequency and impedance, Smith charts, spectrum analyzers, VNAs, oscillators, digital logic…
Okay it sounds like a lot but if you have an hour or two to study per week you’d be surprised at how much you can learn in just a few years!
The lab course is getting harder to run since the parts in the BOM on the author website are being end-of-life'd. I ran into this when I started trying to run it as a self-study project a while ago. It wasn't always clear what parts you could use to replace them either...
Also, the BOM itself doesn't have everything used in the course, so I sometimes found I needed to order something I hadn't anticipated needing. (the frustration with this ultimately caused me to drop it, maybe half-ish of the way through)
This doesn't really negate your point, the lab course certainly still exists, I'm just not sure how amenable it is to run through as a self-study hobbyist.
It looks like some others on the eevblog forums have run into the same issues. I found a discussion on putting together a BOM for the second edition here [1].
It seems like it would be a good community project to maintain an updated BOM of available parts for the lab course!
The level of debugging involved, all the way to the wallswitch in this was frankly impressive. I doubt most people would have dived that deep into an analog issue.
it's likely not the dimmer's fault; phase angle triac dimmers were designed when resistive loads (incandescent light bulbs) were king. except for the super-low-wattage-per-lumen type, most LED light bulbs I run across these days are based capacitive dropper power supplies, which are inductive by nature (hence their atrocious power factor). combining that kind of load with phase-angle dimming is a recipe for crazy harmonics many orders of magnitude higher than the 60Hz base frequency.
I assume that design based on something like TPS92411 actually ends up being cheaper and more reliable than various series capacitor constructions, while being dimmable just fine and without spewing EMI. So it is just question of the OEMs having one 10 year old design and still using it.
