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Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.

Category: Electronics Workbench

Electrical & Electronic gadgets

Mobile Amateur Radio Power: Check the Fuseholders

The Yaesu FT-857 I have in the car has been not turning on lately, which I feared had something to do with being cooked inside a closed van for a week on the top level of a Camden parking garage during the hottest part of the summer.

But, no, as it turned out, that had nothing to do with it: when I got the radio on the workbench, it powered up just fine. Back in the car, it’s dead.

Which implies a power problem. The radio power comes from 10-AWG zip cord, through a pair of 40 A fuses, directly from the battery. The zip cord terminates in Anderson Powerpoles (of course) under the driver seat, mated to the end of the cable that came with the radio. That cable uses craptastic Molex connectors (equally of course) that are instantly suspect when any problems arise, plus a pair of smaller in-line 3AG glass fuses.

Voltage at the Molex connectors: anything from 4.8 V to 11.9 V, depending on imponderable factors. Voltage at the Powerpoles: ditto. So maybe it’s not the Molex connectors, after all.

The 40 A fuses are the kind the high-power automotive sound system folks use, complete with gratuitous goldish-plated everything. These I got surplus at a minute fraction of sticker price and mounted on the air filter housing, thusly:

Engine compartment fuses for radio power

I plugged a 12 V bulb in place of the radio, then went a-measuring. Voltage downstream of the hot fuse: 0 V. Tah-dah, it’s a bad fuse!

Nope, the fuse element is intact.

The zip cord terminates in ferrules penetrated by 1/8-inch setscrews. Applying a wrench, I find that the setscrews are somewhat loose, although nothing catastrophic. Tighten all four screws and the radio turns on just fine.

Case closed!

Until the next day, when the radio doesn’t turn on. Reinstall the lamp, re-measure, once again find 0 V downstream of the hot fuse.

Pull the fuse out again and it comes apart in my hand.

Defective 40A fuse

Huh. That would explain everything.

I suspect the fuse was marginally defective from the factory and finally failed after that prolonged heat wave. Living in the engine compartment isn’t easy under the best of circumstances, so I’ll give this one a pass.

Being that sort of bear, I plucked a spare fuse from the ziplock baggie of fuses & bulbs that’s tucked into the van’s jack compartment, popped it in place, and the radio works fine again.

Problem solved, for sure!

Side note: those fuseholder screws go through the air filter housing, into nuts with Loctite, and I ruined the threads to absolutely prevent the nuts from coming off. You really don’t want a nut loose inside the engine air intake, downstream of the air filter and upstream of the throttle…

2010-08-29
Yaesu FT-857 Front Panel: Up-Armored Plug

The remote cable for the Yaesu FT-857 I have in the car terminates in an 8-pin modular plug. The connector body has a cutout for the round rubber (?) insulation around the cable; it’s not set up for a standard flat 8-wire network cable. However, the cable makes a right-angle bend immediately outside the Front Panel to fit inside the confines of the remote mounting case, which pulled the insulation out of the connector.

Connector with displaced insulation

The electrical connections are fine, but that can’t last. I finally got around to armoring that bend to (I hope!) prevent any problems. Contrary to what you might expect from my proclivity to blob epoxy on everything, I blobbed on hot-melt glue to hold the wires in place, as well as turn a bit of the cable into a rigid body. Even in a hot car, this ought to work fine…

Connector with hot-melt glue

I put some ordinary adhesive tape on the back of the Panel, butted up against the connector body, to keep the glue out of the socket and off the (back of the) Front Panel. That prevents the connector from becoming one with the Panel.

Pause while the glue solidifies, release the latch and pry the connector+glue off the tape with a small screwdriver, trim the excess glue, then peel the tape off the Panel. The connector snaps into place just like it should and the wires no longer have any freedom of motion.

Here’s what the modified connector looks like in all its glory. The cable really does bend downward slightly beyond a right angle in order to fit into a recess in the Front Panel.

Finished connector kludge

This isn’t suitable for a connector getting a lot of the old in-out in-out, but the Front Panel remains in place for months at a time and this should delay the inevitable failure.

2010-08-20
HT GPS + Audio: Revised Schematic

This is a tweak to the previous design, based on some road testing.

An attenuator on the output of the MAX4467 voice amp allows gains below unity. Right now, the MAX4467 has Av=5 and the attenuator cuts it back by about 1/5, so the overall gain is about unity. I have a bunch of surplus electret mic capsules and some have come through really hot; this allows backing the gain way down with the mic amp set to Av=1.

That requires stiffening the Vcc/2 supply by swapping in a 33 µF cap for the original 1 µF unit. If you don’t do that, the amp turns into a oscillator: the attenuator jerks the Vcc/2 supply around, which feeds back to the non-inverting input of the MAX4467. In principle, the gain should be less than unity, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

The MOSFET relay sometimes didn’t quite turn on from the piddly 4 mA available through the ICOM IC-Z1A’s mic power supply; it was vaguely temperature dependent. I returned to an ordinary optocoupler with a CTR of about 100% driving a 2N2907 PNP transistor, as in the first-pass design that you never saw.

The two 2N2907 devices allow either a through-hole TO-92 or SMD SOT-3 package, depending on what you have and the power dissipation you need. In my situation, the SMD version suffices, with less than 100 mV of V_CE saturation.

Let me know if you need the Eagle PCB files or PCB layouts.

Clicky for a bigger image…

GPS + Voice HT Interface schematic – revised 15 July 2010

[Update: I’m not convinced the Vcc/2 supply is stiff enough. I ripped out the attenuator and cut the amp gain to 1.0. If I get some really hot capsules, I’ll think it over a bit more.]

2010-08-12
Earbud Cushion Replacement

Somehow I managed to shred the silicone cushion of the earbud on my bike radio. As nearly as I can tell, it got caught between the seat and the back; the missing part certainly isn’t inside my ear.

Anyhow, I have a bag of spare cushions from all the other earbuds, so this isn’t a showstopper.

The adhesive snot holding the earwax filter in place also failed, so I figured I should fix that while I had the hood up. The old filter was all ooky with earwax & oil & dried sweat, which meant that any new adhesive wouldn’t stick. I chopped a disk from a random foam earbud cover with a 7/32-inch hollow punch and glued it in place with some acrylic sealant.

Earbud cushion and wax filter replacement

While I had the sealant out, I replaced the tape sealing the vent hole (on the other end of the earbud) with a dot of glop, much as I should have done originally.

2010-08-11
External Li-Ion Pack Intermittent Connection: Solved!

After all the hassle of dismantling the battery pack, removing the jack from the board required nothing more complex than a solder sucker.

Coaxial power jack – solder side

With the jack in hand, I idly poked a coaxial plug into it and realized that the amount the plug stuck out was just about exactly equal to the thickness of the black plastic cap on its tip. Some rummaging turned up one of the six plugs with a missing tip, at which point both the problem and its solution were obvious.

Broken vs original coaxial power tips

A bit of tedious work with a tiny screwdriver and a needle convinced the socket to disgorge the plastic ring from its bowels …

Broken tip extracted from jack

Now, I suppose I could have figured this out without taking the case apart, but actually fixing the problem would still require surgery, soooo there’s no wasted effort. That’s my story and I’m sticking with it.

If you think you could extract that ring from the outside, there’s a joke about that.

I put the case back together with a few dabs of silicone snot adhesive (despite what I know about letting acetic acid loose near electronics) to anchor the circuit board, applied a belly band of tastefully color-coordinated (i.e. silver) duct tape, and it’s all good.

Actually, the pack was stone cold dead until I plugged it into the charger to reset its battery protection circuitry. Evidently, disconnecting and reconnecting the battery tripped the protection logic. I’ve seen that in other Li-Ion packs, so it wasn’t quite so scary as it was the first time around.

As for the coaxial power tip: a dab of solvent glue, an overnight clamping session, and I think it’ll work fine forever more.

I should machine up some stabilizing collars around the sockets to match that obvious shoulder on the plug, shouldn’t I?

2010-08-07
External Li-Ion Pack Intermittent Connection: Dismantling the Pack
The power lead into the Li-Ion pack I’m using for the bike radio became badly intermittent on a recent ride. When I got back I swapped in a different pack and the problem Went Away, but I noticed that the coaxial power plug didn’t seem to seat all the way into the jack on the failed pack. I’d noticed that before, although I attributed it to getting two different sets of the packs; it didn’t seem to make any difference.

Given that I was going to have to either repair or replace the jack, dismantling the offending pack was next on the list. Some preliminary poking showed that there were no screws concealed under the label, so the two halves of the pack were either snapped or bonded together.

The case didn’t respond to the usual wedging and prying by revealing an opening, which suggested that it was bonded. That meant I must saw the thing apart.

I set up a 31-mil slitting saw on the Sherline and clamped the pack atop a random plastic slab atop the tooling plate. The Sherline’s limited throat depth meant I had to cut the far side of the pack. I aligned the saw to the Z-axis level of the joint along the middle of the pack by eyeballometric guesstimation.

Slitting saw setup

Key point:
- You absolutely do not want to saw into a lithium-ion cell, not even a little bit.
Therefore:
- The pack must be aligned parallel to the cutter’s travel
- The cuts must proceed in tiny increments, and
- You must verify that each cut doesn’t reveal any surprises.
In this setup, the pack aligns against a clamp on the left side and to a parallel block (removed while cutting) along the rear edge of the tooling plate. I could then unclamp the pack, rotate it to put the next edge in place, and use the same XYZ origin with the edge parallel to X.

Here’s the view from the back of the table.

Sawing the case

I ran the spindle at 5 k RPM and cut about 15 inch/secminute. I’m sure the pros do it faster, but that was enough to warm up the blade and that’s fast enough for me. [Update: typo on the units. Thanks!]

Cuts were 0.020 inch per pass, which is about 0.5 mm. I expected the case to be some hard-metric dimension and wasn’t disappointed.

After the cuts reached 0.060 inch, I manage to pry the remaining plastic in the joint apart and split the halves apart along the connectors and LEDs at the front where I couldn’t do any sawing.

Here’s a close look at the cut, just above the battery terminals. The case turned out to be 2 mm thick, about 0.080 inch, so I was just about all the way through. The cut was perfectly aligned with the case and cracked open neatly along the entire length.

Tight tolerance on the cut depth

An interior view, showing that the cells adhered to the left half of the case and the electronics to the right: of course. I pried the cells loose from the left side, which provided enough access to unsolder the things, as the terminals were against the case. Notice that there’s absolutely nothing between the inside of the case and the outside of the cell, so cutting just slightly too deep would be a Bad Thing™.

First look inside the case

After a bit of work, here’s the entire layout…

Battery pack internal layout

Much to my surprise, the battery consists of two series-connected sets of three cells: 2 x 3.7 V = 7.4 V. I expected three series sets for about 3 x 3.7 = 11.1 V, with a linear regulator down to the 9.0 V output.

As it turns out, they used two switching regulators: the one between the two triplets controls the charging voltage and the one to the lower-left boosts the battery to the pack’s 9.0 V output. I had hoped for a resistor divider that I could tweak to get 9.6 V out, but it certainly wasn’t obvious.

I unsoldered the cells, dismounted the circuit board, and puzzled over it for a bit, after which the problem was obvious.

The story continues tomorrow, with a dramatic denouement…
2010-08-06
Pin Spanner for 3.5 mm Audio Jack Nut

The external antenna jack on the Totally Featureless Clock is, by necessity, recessed way down in a hole (because I can’t get to the inside of the now-finished half-inch-thick case to gnaw it out from there). Perforce, that puts the locking nut out of reach.

Solution: a pin spanner wrench. I’m sure they’re available commercially, but what’s the fun in that?

The male threaded part of the jack is 0.230 inch OD, the nut is 0.313 OD, and the notches are 0.030 wide and 0.020 deep. Raw material is about two inches of 5/16-inch air-hardening drill rod, not that I’m actually going to heat treat it for this application.

Face off the end and drill the guts out with a 15/64-inch drill.

Drilling central recess

Grab it in the 3-jaw chuck bolted firmly to the table, then mill off anything that isn’t a pin. Don’t grab it in the milling vise, which doesn’t have enough oomph to hold a slick steel cylinder in place; don’t ask how I know this.

Milling pins in 3-jaw chuck

Set Z=0 at the top surface of the spanner-to-be and XY = 0 on the axis of the cylinder, of course.

Manual CNC, feeding the commands into EMC2’s MDI slot and then mouse-clicking the stored commands to avoid reduce typing errors. For my setup, Y=±0.171 to produce the 30-mil pin and X=±0.4 to clear on both sides.

After cutting the first side at 3 k RPM, feed 2 inches/min, and 10 mils per pass, I whacked the other side off in one giant 20-mil bite. I’m such a sissy…

A bit of heatshrink tubing improves the griptivity and it’s all good.

Finished spanner engaged in nut

This is the sort of thing you do once, drop in the baggie with the rest of the connector nuts, and use for years thereafter. I should’a done it years ago, but I’ve been able to not quite butcher the nuts with a needle-nose pliers…

[Update: It turns out a commercial nut driver was available, at least in one special shop in one special place, but no longer. For my delicate uses, that shaft into the jack isn’t really needed.]

2010-07-30