Okay, we're back here live in Silicon Valley. This is Silicon Angle in Wikibon's theCUBE, our flagship program where we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Angle. I'm Joe Michaels. Dave Vellante, the co-founder of wikibon.org and this is theCUBE. We'd love to go talk to anyone who has information and data and share that with you, extracting the signal from the noise, as we say. And our next guest here is Thomas Summers, CEO and founder of Rex Computing, 17-year-old whiz kid, fellowship from Peter Thiel's fellowship program where he encourages kids to pursue their passion, take a break or drop out of school. Congratulations. Welcome to theCUBE. Well, thank you.  You know, we were just at the Apple 30th anniversary, WASNIC wasn't there, but we know WAS from Fusion IO. We've interviewed him and we've known him in the valley. You're the next WAS. You're out there building out the next stuff. Tell us a little bit about, one, what the story is around the fellowship, okay, the award, when did it happen and what are you building? Yeah, so I received the Thiel fellowship in May of this year, or not this year, of 2013. And basically how it works is there's a whole application process and finally rounds down to the 20 under 20 and so it's called the 20 under 20 Thiel Fellowship where you receive $100,000 over two years with the only requirement being is that you can't be enrolled in school. So I applied, this is actually my third time applying and I put in working in high performance computing and specifically tried to reduce the cost and the energy needs by computing by many orders of magnitude. And so I received the fellowship and started a company. Sometimes Charm. I guess so. So any VC funding yet? I mean we're in a bubble. I mean any funding yet from besides Peter Thiel? No, so thankfully I actually dropped out of my 11th grade of high school so I didn't have any debt and I've been able to bootstrap.  So I dropped out one month before the end of my junior year. Okay, so technically you've got two years under your belt of high school. Yes, in terms of... Were you really bored in class? Kind of, yeah. I asked him what he got on his SATs and he said I didn't take him. But Dave, this brings up a big trend. Before we get into, we're talking about the kid, we call them the next waz because it is a lot of hardware geeking going on there. Dave, this is exactly kind of what we talk about the cue, you know. Information, the commoditization of journalism and publishing and information flow is the new normal and you don't need to go to linear school or you can just, you go online, multi-online mooks or multi-online classrooms, information's out there. People can move at such different paces. This is why I'm so passionate about Silicon Academy, the things we're doing that's going to be coming out this next year and props to Peter Thiel because some people are against this, like hey, you know, why disrupt the status quo? But hey, linear path in school is not. So I mean, did you have any reservations or you're like, thank God I'm out of high school?  It was pretty crazy at first. I found out I received the fellowship. It was kind of a surreal experience for the first couple of days after, week after I found out that I received it, I officially withdrew from high school. And it was kind of just weird, okay, this is just a whole new step into my life. I had already been working prior to receiving the fellowship. I worked at MIT for just over three years at the point and I kind of had some life expenses.  So take us through the first two rejections. Like, were you pumped to apply? Were you not sure? Was the rejections hard on you? And then obviously you kept coming back at a third time's a charm. Take us through that. Yeah, so the first year I applied, I was 14. It was kind of, I've always just been a geek and working in many different areas. And so I wasn't really focused in my application and I was also pretty young. Like, I definitely wouldn't have chosen me at 14. What inspired you, let me ask you that question. What was the inspiration to have the passion to do the kind of geekiness that you're doing, certainly with hardware? You don't randomly see that. It's kind of like a black swan scenario where you get someone at that level. Did you have a relative in the computer business? Do you have your own workshop? How did you get into, what was the motivator, what was the inspiration? So my mom was self-employed. She had a desktop publishing business. She did layout and stuff for different newspapers. And so she had computers in her office and I got to use them from when I was like two until I started first grade when I was about six. And I just really loved them. And when I got about seven, my dad got me my first electronics kit.  And I just thought that it was really amazing that you could take a bunch of components which don't really do anything on their own and you can make something entirely new. And at that point I was just going through a book and doing all the different projects that I could, you know, that were in there but it started making me think of, okay, but what if I apply these different things and start putting things together in a different way? And I just found out.   From Massachusetts. Yeah. So how'd that go? Was it supportive or reluctantly supportive or how'd you deal with that?  The first time I applied, she thought I was kind of crazy for applying, but she, you know, you know, do what you want. But when I finally got into the finalist round for the fellowship, it kind of, okay, there's, you know, about a 50-50 chance that I'll actually receive it. And she thankfully believed in me and thought that, you know, if I actually set my mind to doing something, that I could do it. So the product that you've conceived, it's, I mean, big trends, right? Obviously low power, you got multi-cores going on and you're observing these trends. So how did it all come together? And you've got a prop here. What are you actually building? So I originally started this sort of line of research at the lab I was working at at MIT, the Institute for Soldier and Nanotechnologies. And so my mentor advisor there that kind of wrote me into all of this had a long history of working in high-performance computing. And so we got interested in some ARM stuff. So he was utilizing cell phone processors to do high-performance computing and just specifically clustering them to be able to do more computational work with them. And so this was about 2010 and we bought a bunch of TIO map development boards. So it was the first dual core ARM processor, commercially available. And we decided to get a bunch of them and start seeing what we could do. And so it took, going with a bunch of different designs and such, about nine months later, we got a full system and we built a supercomputer in a rubber-made trash can. And that was, at that point, we had actually built a, what you could almost call a supercomputer out of these cell phone processors. We had 48 of them, total 96 cores. And we thought, okay, this is pretty cool. We posted online. It got a bit of attention.  And then we also wrote a paper on the research end. But then thought, okay, could this be possibly turned into a company or something along those lines? Okay, so it's a challenging area. We were at the original HP Moonshot announcement right outside of Bill and Dave's offices in Palo Alto. That was pretty cool. Calzada, one of the companies that was at that announcement is now defunct. What is, and John's mentioned the walls a couple of times. And it's actually quite interesting, John. I mean, the early floppy disk, right? The system on a board. We look back now, before you were born.  What is it that you're doing that you see as breakthrough? So in the evolution of how this just started as a fun research project to being a company, we were originally just fascinated with arm processors, what you could do with a bunch of really wimpy cores. And that's now involved to what we're doing today, which is utilizing co-processors to kind of get the performance boost against a conventional, say, Intel processor when doing high performance computing tasks. So what I have here is a development board called Parallella by a company called Adaptiva. And so this has a dual core ARM Cortex-A9 processor with an integrated FPGA. But the really fancy part about it is this 16 core co-processor, which can get about 30 gigaflops while using like two watts of electricity. So that's beating an Intel CPU and performance per watt. It's obviously not getting to its actual raw performance. But when you put 10 of these together, you're beating an Intel chip while it costs less and, you know, output starts to outperform it. So obviously the key to massive scale adoption is applications. I mean, you're certainly seeing it in mobile. Do you see, I mean, obviously you see it, how long do you feel like this will take to really essentially take over the data center? It's from a concept standpoint, it makes total sense. Everybody's complaining about, you know, heat density and space and power and cooling. So it makes so much sense. What are the headwinds? Obviously application support and how long do you think it'll take for this to take the data center by storm? Yeah, so the, what we came here to the Open Compute Summit with was a prototype we threw together in about three weeks. And it's a Open Compute Winterfell Torpedo chassis. And we filled it up with these boards and are using it as basically a development platform because we wanted to kind of test the software waters. And we're, there's the Open Compute hackathon happening here right now. And we're giving the different hackathon participants access to both these boards and the systems in our rack. And the idea, I mean, the big problem, both when it comes to ARM and any sort of co-processor is that it is difficult to develop for. Companies don't want to port their software and they don't want to just deal with that mess. And so I'm personally a hardware person but thankfully other members of my team are much more capable on the software side. And we're working on some new ways to both ease development on highly scalable systems and utilizing co-processors. So that's part of the project is actually a development platform on which people can build applications. Yeah, so the system we're showing here has 256 of these epiphany cores. And we have that running as a MPI cluster and we're trying to get other people interested in developing with it. But our actual product plans are to utilize the next generation epiphany chip with each chip has 64 cores, the epiphany four. And having 64 of those chips in a single, one third width 1U torpedo. So you can have 1,024 cores inside that or 3,072 cores in a 1U open compute blade. Thomas, is this a certainty in your mind that this type of architecture eventually will rule the world? Or do you feel like whether it's ARM or Intel has Adam, whatever. Some type of low power processor, obviously ARM has the big lead. Or do you feel like existing designs, X86, let's say, can be brought down to scale? What's your thought on that? So to first address the X86 point, X86 just has a lot of baggage with it. I mean, it was originally CISC and then obviously Intel brought in the whole microcode concept and they've actually have a risk core which a lot of people don't realize that X86 is risk. And they've basically just abstracted all of it. So they have the same X86 instructions and then a decoder which actually has it and it's native. And so you hit some limits with this. I mean, for the past 40 or 50 years almost, we've had Moore's law with us and so we get that basically free performance or energy boost depending on the way you look at it every 18 months or so. But with that starting to run out, we're going to be hitting some physical barriers pretty soon which you can't really contest with using silicon. We're not going to have those free improvements. And so X86, how it is having backwards compatibility all the way to 386 and Intel's focus on just trying to cram as much features and to throw in as many instructions as possible is just a bulky instruction set and processor that just isn't needed. And that's why I think that the most simple thing is the best. Thomas, talk about your plans now. So how far are you in the fellowship? And the question is, what do you do when the money runs out? Is there a follow on? Do they give Moore's or Milestones? So the fellowship money is given out over two years and so we receive $4,400 or so a month. And crazily enough, I've somehow been able to live on that while I was starting a company in the Bay Area, it's kind of... But it's going to dry up at some point so it's a two-year run, right? So it's almost like a really kick-ass internship with cash co-op assignment like I had when I was in college. But what are you going to do next? Is there a program extension? Have you been communicated? Do they communicate like, hey, if you do well or hey, you're on your own, make it or break it? So like another program that Teal Foundation offers or has that is not directly connected to the fellowship in any way, but besides it being run by the same group is Breakout Labs, which a number of Teal Fellows have talked with at least. Gone into, yeah. And so there's things like that, but I still have about a year and a half left. Yeah, you got plenty of time, which I was just curious. People might be curious about what the headroom's going to look like, the ladder, if you will. I have been bootstrapping up to this point, but would at some point like to raise some money just to be able to scale out. And so... How about a team?  Have you looked at trying to find more teammates? So we currently have a full-time team of three. And then we have a couple different contributors and people kind of working part-time. And so... But it's a for-profit venture. Yes. It's not like science project. No. The server, let me see. Yeah. What's this called? So that's two parallel boards. And so the unit that we have is having 16 of those, but the really cool part about it, if you forget about the Xilinx dual-core arm is the fact that it has that 16-core core processor, which is currently one of the most power-efficient processors on the market. And what's the plans for it? So this first system that we are going to be shipping this year is going to have 1,024 with the Epiphany III. So 1,024 Epiphany Quars. And then with the Epiphany IV having 4,096 Quars in a single torpedo. Is being an entrepreneur what you thought it would be? Or not? And what's different? Yeah, it is different. Well, what did you expect in the mind of looking at what you might be embarking on? And what was the reality? Share the folks that pre-conditioning view and then what happened inside now that you're an entrepreneur? I thought that there would be a lot more parties. Yeah, I mean the social network has kind of given a bad name to the valley in that respect. Bong hits and funnels and beer bongs. And no, none of that, huh? Just sitting and we're making a circuit board.  Basically, and I'm honestly happy with that. We call it eating glass.  Eat glass, spit out nails, that's what we call it. So you're saying it's not glamorous as people think it is? Not at all. But I would say just as or I think even more fulfilling being here, I was out to the Denver Supercomputing Conference back in November and just being able to go to these events and actually feel like I'm contributing something to society by building something and creating value of some sort is a lot more than I would be doing if I was still in high school or if I would go on to college. So now we turn the interview onto John and Dave's personal focus group test. Since you're the young gun coming up, 17, obviously connected to a computer since you were two, so it's great. Now, but now digital natives are all connected. I have kids as well, 117, 118, same-year age. And what do you think about this discussion around education? I mean, there are many people including myself who think education is completely broken and think there are better ways than say government the way they're handling it. But you're a great example of someone who's in that linear track and now the virtual space, the internet, the connections are resources. So what's your vision and what are your opinion around education? I'm not going to hold it to you. So just it's your opinion. So there's no wrong answer. Yeah. What's your opinion on the future of the best path possible for education? I think one thing that is not developed in school, especially at the early ages where it's really needed is to find one how to learn. Like actually, and that how to learn I think is everyone's born with it. It's just not nurtured and that is curiosity and- The ability to learn, love to learn? And love to learn. And so I see that a lot of schools try to, creativity is good, but they really try to structure it in some way either through drawing or having an art class but not offering other programs and trying to fit everyone into some sort of mold. And I just think that that's the wrong way to go about it. And while that may have been required to a small extent by society 150 to 100 years ago when industrial revolution, there weren't, the society was actually trying to mold people into going into industrial jobs and such. That is I think detrimental to society now. And we're not adapting the education system. What do you think about these Gen 1 MOOCs? M-O-O-C, multi online courses. Massive online online courses. Essentially like video games basically. Are they too linear? Are they not enough data? Is the application tooling not there? Or is it good? What's your opinion?  I'm sure you use, I'll do a lot of learning online because you're a curious, smart kid. But I mean, you tap the resources available to you. What needs to get done? What are these MOOCs? What is this all about? What's this new online situation like? M-O-O-C-I haven't actually been involved with any of them. I haven't taken like an organized class. But from my knowledge of it, I think that it's a good idea for people who already are motivated and people who want to truly learn. And I think that sadly, many people who have the opportunity and the ability is to do many different things are discouraged at a young age and thus lose the love of knowledge. Let me ask you a different question. Where do you go to learn? I read a lot of papers. I enjoy, sadly, I don't have academic, like actual paper access, any research journal access through a school anymore. But just reading whatever the cutting edge research is from different labs from across the world. And you do that online, right? Yes. And so. Talk about academic papers. Yeah. I think that there's a lot of cutting edge research, which is like you see a lot of these things in the news all the time. But I find those to be the ones that make the biggest claims that typically are far from truth. And then the ones that are really interesting get published and nobody else sees it. Nobody talks about it. So and then we see them in 20 years. But that's a real art to be able to sort of squint through that text and figure out which ones really matter. So what are some of the things that you're tracking to these days?  What else intrigued you? Ever since I saw Iron Man, I've been very, very interested in augmented reality and wearable computing. I see that's now a big thing now. But I think that that isn't going to be successful in this first generation with Google Glass and some of the other things that are going to be on the market. I think that there's going to be a lot of potential in some of the new photonics and laser research, which is taking place right now, but industry hasn't quite gotten directly involved with it. And so I think that academia is actually ahead right now with it, but it'll be getting into actual production in a couple years. Okay, Thomas, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Very impressive individual and gutsy to drop out of high school. Looks like you're well along the way, but you might want to just go mail in University of Phoenix, might have a high school GED program. It's like an hour of your time, knock it out. I don't even know if that's even an option, I just made that up, but sounded good. The future is what you're doing, and I think that's what I find truly interesting.  So thanks for coming on theCUBE. It's theCUBE, we'll be right back. 17 year old genius here in Southern theCUBE, Peter Thielfellow, $100,000 grant to drop out of school, start his own company, and we'll see how that goes. We'll be keeping track of it. We'll be right back after this short break.


Fire in the hole, fire in the hole, fire in the hole. We are explosive ordnance disposal technicians. We handle any chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or explosive hazard in for the United States Army. It's a very technically challenging job and it's very dangerous. Daily we'll take care of extremely dangerous explosives and overseas improvised explosive devices that are designed to harm U.S. troops and local civilians. We get to do a lot of good for the local populace and as well as our fellow soldiers. So I think in respect to readiness the competitions that we hold all the time, these team of the year competitions, competitions we do within our companies, it helps, you know, it helps readiness by evaluating where our shortcomings are with our team leaders and our team members. So it really gives a commander kind of a thermometer of where their soldiers are at, what they need to train on and, you know, what we can improve.


So today I am super excited to finally be working on a Toshiba brand television Now Toshiba has been long thought of as like the fourth or fifth best possible Brands for CRT televisions and I found some really good ones But the one we're working on today is brand new to me and it's got a flat screen. Yes I'm talking about the Toshiba 24 AF 45 and this is a color television Analog only television. It's got a lot of great inputs including composite and S video and even a component Input that Toshiba called color stream. So it has all the potential to be a great CRT However, it is loaded with some problems and some secrets So hopefully this video will help you decide if you want to get one of these televisions Or if you already have one of these televisions You'll be able to use this guide and this information to get the best out of your Toshiba 24 AF 45 Before we go into the CRT. I have to give you a big warning This is the most dangerous television CRT line that I have ever worked on There's a big chance that you could take a real shock from the anode cap on this CRT So please make sure you watch this entire video before you decide to open your Toshiba 24 AF 45 up and try to do something inside it. Please. Please. Please watch this. It may save your life Okay, so with the warning out of the way, we're gonna jump into the Toshiba 24 AF 45 And we're gonna reveal all the good the bad and the ugly Well back here in the very unattractive garage shop Self-loading area of retro tech and this is where the larger CRT sit in all the back Stock of parts as well as the boneyard and one of the CRTs I'm working on today is actually one of the larger ones So it has to stay outside for the most part and what I'm looking at today is actually this lovely Toshiba set It's a flat screen standard definition analog television from the early 2000s it's got a great picture, but it definitely needs some servicing so I'm just kind of getting the first look at this set to begin with and The issues here are at startup. We have some glitching on the screen This set has a nice amount of inputs. We've got what's called color stream from Toshiba But that's actually our component video. It does have a composite video out We have composite video in and S video, which is the signal I've been testing and of course we have RF on the front of the set There's a trap door with another set of composite video inputs and then an audio jack for Headphones very sleek design on this Toshiba inside our set. We actually have a pretty simple chassis design Obviously, this is our neck board and then our anode cap right there, which we will discharge in a second This is a quick look at the deflection yoke right there And then these are our convergence and purity adjustment rings right there And if we look around there's only a few connections. So this should be pretty easy to get apart and put together We've got our degausing cable right here and our power input And then we've got our deflection yoke connection right here And this up here is just to our speakers So we can disconnect that and We will pull everything all together. I'll pull the neck board With the chassis after I discharge it, but let's just get ready though To discharge the tube. All right, we've come to the dangerous part and you're going to see me discharge this tube But I need to warn you the way I discharge this tube is probably not the best way for this crt I'm doing it the way to kind of protect the hardware But this particular Toshiba does not have any kind of bleeder resistor built into the anode system at all So when you go in and you discharge this crt, you are always going to get A large spark. There will always be a large discharge of electricity So just be prepared for that. All right. So back to the zap. So we've got this nice big ground strap on this set And we can just plug into it right there. Then we are going to Discharge this thing right up here Um at the cap I'm going to remove the cap first and then we'll discharge everything Afterwards. Oh, I hear some You hear that Possible electricity in there. I'm hearing some in that cap right there Let's see Oh, do you hear that it flipped over There was definitely some electricity still there There's still electricity right there. I could have zapped myself. So there's always that chance Well, let's just see if anything happens when I touch the actual anode cap. Oh, I hear it You hear it? Oh We did get a zap right there. Wow do it again just to make sure I didn't really see anything, but I definitely had a zap there on this tube and We'll discharge this thing a couple more times. I'm going to let it sit and then re discharge it but That was pretty that's pretty wild. You normally don't see that on professional stuff But that that should be a big warning to anybody who's ever messed around with Consumer sets even these high-end ones like from toshiba. You could have really gotten yourself zapped on there. It's a pretty large tube Well, I'm down here in my shop and I've finished servicing the main circuit board. I'm about to show that to you so here's our main board and This area over here is the power supply area. So this was serviced As well as this area and other power supply parts here. These are our deflection capacitors So all these in this zone and this and that area and there's a couple back in here All that was serviced and then same thing with the neck board. That's what I consider to be the vital parts The rest of the board is not in high temperature areas except for the stereo audio amp and That's all those caps tested out fine. Now one more thing I had to do was the solder on this I talked about this more in a stream. I did where I worked on this board and made the cap kit But this is a lead free board. It's marked on all the boards where it says pb It says right there pb free I don't know if you could see that down there where my thumb is But it says pb free right there So this board was soldered with solder that didn't have any lead in it And now since it's been about 20 years since the solder was fresh It's definitely gotten some corrosion and it doesn't look good It's oxidized. So I've gone through and reflowed all the solder on both boards And that's something you may have to do that may be more important than the cap kit on this particular toshiba However, if you do want the cap kit, I will publish this cap kit over to my patreon Discord page. So that's where you can find the cap kit. Um, this has been clean and resoldered And the capacitors are fresh and now we can go stick this back in the tube and actually test it All right guys, excuse the poor audio. I'm sure you're capturing a lot of that sound from the crt I've got it fired back up down here. I've plugged in my standard video source. Everything is going okay Um, we got her powered on and I'm just going to let it Do its thing here for a minute. You notice we are still getting a little bit of jitters over here And this would happen the first time I turned the crt on but after it warmed up for like 30 minutes It stopped doing it. So I'm not Exactly sure Obviously, whatever we did it did not fix this problem fully and it may be something with the tube or flyback We'll have to sit here and monitor it. I'm going to let it run for a good half an hour and then we'll see how it looks It's still doing it a little bit right there We'll give it some more time. We'll come back and check and hopefully After the crt is completely warmed up for a half an hour Hopefully these Squiggly lines will stop. All right. Well, it's been over an hour and unfortunately, I'm still seeing The disruption and interference here Even beyond a standard warm-up time So this might be something where this flyback is just on its last leg now before I completely give up on this set I'm going to pull the circuit board Another time and we'll check out all those other areas on the main board that May still have some bad soldering or bad solder joints and I'm connected to my ground strap I'm not touching anything metal We're going to try to get under this cap and see if we can get a a zap. Oh, I heard it All right, so check out this I've refilled solder on this board But I don't think it's going to probably make much of a difference what I see here is A samsung flyback transformer, but the issue right here is this is a phase three lead free flyback transformer So I have to think for sure that what is happening here is the lead free solder Is degrading and breaking down within this flyback transformer and that's really That's really bad news All right, I just Installed the circuit board again and we're still seeing the issues on here With the vibrating edges and center and then you'll see Sometimes the image will swell And brightness will change where it'll go a little bit brighter and then back to Darker and I just believe that it all has to do with that flyback transformer Lots of jitters Well, it was about this point that I was ready to throw in the towel and just give up on this tosheba However, I started to troubleshoot a little bit more And I noticed that as I turned up the screen's brightness And contrast to above normal standards It would actually balance out the tube and we no longer had the distortion along the sides of the edges I've managed to make the image a little bit more stable by increasing the brightness And the contrast up to the levels above 45 I've got contrast at 48 brightness at 46 and by doing that It's almost stabilized the picture and it's helping that flyback Produce a more consistent image now. It does look a bit Bloomed out you might say or there's a little bit too much Screen like if you have an all dark screen For example If your screen's all dark, it doesn't actually show dark But when you turn it down To the proper darkness level and blackness level it's going to cause the flyback to start to shake And do all the things that you saw before because now The screen's looking really good after just a short warm-up time But you see how that is you still see a kind of gray show through that And that is just because the brightness is up a bit too high But that's the way the TV likes it. So we're going to leave it like that Our Toshiba has been powered off All night and it is early morning I'm going to power Everything on And again, this is a full cold Toshiba. We're going to see If any distortion happens along the edge from the cold Point of starting it Because I do still think we're going to need some time to warm up You see the screen comes into place like that Let's pull up our arrows. My goodness. Look at that dead cold CRT And We're not having any wiggling So we'll just keep monitoring this But it looks good All right, the set's been running for a while now and I still have a consistent Line here. I didn't have a single time where it glitched at all I didn't have any of the brightness issues It once it turned on and you saw it come alive That was the only brightness thing where it kind of blooms up and gets its size right Since then it's run perfectly All right, so we were able to solve that problem With the jittering screen And after I said to the brightness and contrast at the levels I showed you I didn't have a single issue However, this is one of the ugly parts of this television You have to almost have it a little bit bloomed out in picture And have the brightness over amplified Thus getting you pretty dull blacks.  That's the first time I've ever seen lead free phase three flyback Transformer and I don't really have a lot of confidence in it So those materials will break down quicker than the capacitors the capacitors on this board We're all rubicon and pretty good in quality Not many of them had failed So that's something you need to consider with this 24 af 45 Is the fact that you're going to deal with lead free solder more than likely on your circuit board So let's talk about some of the secrets now Of this toshiba and we should start with how to access some of the additional features that are available First off this is done by getting into the service menu and to do that you will need the remote control for this television set Now to access the menu all you need to do is hold down the volume button On the tv set itself And then you hold down the number nine on the remote And when you hold those down long enough eventually the service menu will just pop up And this service menu is pretty simple to navigate You just use an up and down Arrows on your remote control and the left and right arrows to make changes And then once you make a change you just move on to the next thing Or exit out of the menu and it saves the last setting that was input into it So if you're concerned about making changes, I will warn you you should go through and maybe Record what each of the levels are to begin with Some of the things in there you may not want to adjust So just be mindful of what you're adjusting in that service menu. There's also a second secret and cool thing of this crt and that is that it has an hours counter And the way to access this hours counter is again to hold down the volume button on the tv set And then take the remote control and also hold down the number six button and after a few seconds The counter will pop up on the screen that shows you how many hours are on your crt So how about one more secret this toshiba set has a velocity Modulation package included in the hardware toshiba has designed A special part on this set to hopefully give you edge sharpening this edge sharpening just makes the edges of the picture Appear sharper than they normally would so this velocity modulation Coil is connected to the neck board through a simple connection cable And it appears the only way on this set to disable this feature is to unplug it So let's do some testing now Take a look at the edges with the velocity modulation and then without the velocity modulation and decide which looks best All right, the velocity modulator is engaged right now and we're going to take a look at our Monoscope pattern a little bit closer If you look up in this area, we'll see a lot of hooking going on It's really pronounced in these corners and then this edge area You'll see some hooking And you'll also notice again the line is just not completely straight It looks very sharp, but at the same time it may be Showing more than we want it to in these corners. Check out just the line and how Kind of in dense everywhere It's really not straight enough See it's really squiggly The only way to disengage this is to disconnect this cable right here Just like that the mode is turned off and we'll check out the screen and see if it looks any better Well, this is what the screen looks like without that velocity modulator So let's go in closer to these corners and see if we still see the extra pronounced hooking I noticed that a lot of that has kind of been blended out in these corners There is still a little bit of misshapeness here, but it's not nearly as pronounced as it was with that mode engaged Still does look wonky. See I'm still getting that corner hitch right there However, it does soften up some of the parts, but it hasn't removed every little Hitch on the screen it looks smoother a little bit smoother, but we still have these hitches that Are going to be part of this flat screen tube When you have the velocity modulation engaged It does improve the sharpness of the edges, but it also results in poorer geometry And that softer edge actually looks better to me personally Now let's take a look at some 240p gameplay footage from the super nintendo And we're using component and we're using the hd retro vision high quality component cables here My SNES has been modified with the voltar rgb amplifier and it has been recapped I'm using a triad power supply. So all the parts here are in good shape Let's just see how this looks on screen Well, I can't really sugarcoat this this screen does not look amazing in component Mainly because of the blooming look you get From having to crank up that contrast and brightness on this tube and fly back The resulting image just looks a little bit more washed out It's extremely difficult to film this crt Especially since it's flat and it's got all the light issues with the over blooming picture So it looks even worse on camera than it would in person But for the most part, this is not a great crt to be using in a very dark room The image will look better in a brighter environment So if you have a lot of lights on or if you're in a room with a lot of sunlight That high brightness and contrast on the tube will actually make the image show through better So yeah, all in all, it's not a great picture on this tube compared to many other crt's that are out there, especially other consumer crt's All right after completing this amazing restoration and reviewing this tv set and finding out all the secrets I want to give it a letter grade now. This letter grade is just like in school It's going to go from a plus down to an f And for the tosheba 24 af 45 My final grade is a c minus This television seems to have as many negative qualities as positive qualities Let's talk about the positive qualities first. First off, you do have good inputs So you have composite component as video or f the service menu is a plus And the hours counter is always a plus on a crt However, there is a pretty big stack of negative features to this television First off from a hardware perspective, it doesn't have the most amazing tube. It's an orion tube combined with a Flyback that is a phase three Lead-free flyback transformer and that combination of parts probably would have never held up Longer than say a trinitron tube with a nice high quality Flyback from sony if you look at the circuit boards, really the problem there is the solder again this lead-free solder It's just troublesome. It breaks down quicker than solder with a little bit of lead in it And that is always going to be an issue for this hardware The other negative thing is you need a remote control to really do anything with this set So that's kind of a drawback and finally the image quality is just not like top notch You can get a better looking picture from a curved screen I just don't give it the greatest picture quality due to the blooming look And the fact that it's a flat screen crt with limited geometry controls You end up with some wonkiness along the edges and no matter what you do You're never really going to get that geometry looking perfect Or near perfect like you can with a broadcast or a professional level crt All right, so that's it. That's harsh enough on this toshiba 24 af 45. I'm glad to finally be done working on it. I do like the television set But personally I'm not going to add it to my list of things. I'm going to add to my personal collection Maybe a 14 inch or I could add to the collection But the 24 inch is just too big and there's too many downsides for it for me personally to like But what do you think about it? Do you have one of these sets? Have you been using it for a while? What's your opinions of it? Do you disagree with me and actually love this television? I'd really enjoy hearing your opinion in the comments below Lastly, I'd like to say thank you to all the patreon members out there who support this channel And all my work I do every month If you want more information on patreon, you can definitely check out the link I have pinned in the description as well as a comment down there in the comment section But that's going to do it. If you enjoyed it, please just do the small favor of clicking the like button And I will see you all next time for another massive wonderful crt restoration and review Okay, there are more bad issues with this television if you do not You know Snorlax why don't you go on out of here? I love you All right, come on get out of here.