Category: Electronics Workbench

The electric water heater in the rental house stopped working. I found this in the fusebox.

Looks like it’d been simmering for a while!

Fuses never (uh, rarely) fail as shorts, but sometimes they don’t fail open. The block and fuse box don’t look overheated and seem to be OK, but, sheesh…

I have a pair of trackballs, one on each side of the keyboard, in the interest of dividing the strain on my wrists. The right-hand trackball, a Logitech Cordless Optical Trackman, suddenly stopped working one afternoon: the ball stops moving the pointer, the half-dozen buttons stop selecting things, the scroll wheel stops scrolling.

I poke the resync buttons, replace the batteries, generally futz around, and discover that it’s actually working fine, but with an RF range measured in inches rather than feet. Not good; it’s on a pull-out shelf in the desk leg well and there’s no place for the receiver within a few inches. Besides, it’s supposed to work better than that.

So I take the trackball apart, admire all the little bitty parts, reseat the ribbon cables, blow the fuzz out of the optical sensors, admit there’s not else much I can do, and reassemble it.

Works like a champ again: I love zero-dollar fixes!

I’m pretty sure this is Yet Another Ribbon Cable failure. Those cheap tin-on-tin connections get gassy after a few years, the resistance skyrockets, and (what with No User Serviceable Components Inside) the thing get tossed in the trash. Don’t get me started on RoHS.

As part of all this, I discovered that desktop gadgets mostly use the 27 MHz band, with a few in the low VHF and Bluetooth at 2.4 GHz. I’d have laid money saying everything except BT was UHF, which just goes to show what I (don’t) know…