Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
Tag: Improvements
Making the world a better place, one piece at a time
So I dismantled the three junk packs I got from halfway around the world and rebuilt them with better-quality cells. Search for NP-FS11 and you’ll find the rest of the story.
Some observations…
These cases are the thinnest plastic that doesn’t actually break when you pick it up: to crack the case seam, you must push firmly. Two of the three packs were already cracked and the third yielded to a slight squeeze.
The cells are labeled Sony Energytec, which ought to be a reputable brand name. Some possibilities:
Counterfeit cells
Quality test rejects
I don’t know why you’d bother putting counterfeit cells inside a generic case; it’d be more profitable to sell a completely counterfeit battery with a fancy Sony label. So I’m guessing these came from a batch of cells that failed inspection and were miraculously saved from destruction.
Battery Protection Circuit Board
They have the usual protection circuit board on the top. What’s a bit tricky is that you must unsolder the three leads connecting to the case terminals before you can extract the cells. I unsoldered the strap from the negative terminal while I was at it; the positive lead is inaccessible beyond the black IC on the left.
Magnet wire wants to unspool itself, so it comes with a wrap of tape that eventually turns into a gummy layer. Rather than put new tape on the spool, gash a notch in the rim with a utility knife and capture the wire therein.
Notched Wire Spool
If you’re really clever, you’ll angle the notch so the wire folds backwards and holds itself snug. If you’re not, well, there’s nobody going to notice having two opposing notches in the spool, right?
They used to do this with thread and string, back in the old days when such stuff came on wooden spools, but it seems a lost art…
I finally rebuilt the snowblower gas cap, this time before the splash cone worried its way through the plastic stem and dumped all the parts into the tank.
The black rubbery domed thing conceals a chunk of open-cell foam that evidently separates the gasoline from the vent channels under the rim. The plastic stem was quite eroded, but probably had another season or two left in it; now I need not worry about it.
Unlike with the shredder cap, this time I put the screw head on the outside and the jam nuts on the inside; there’s also a jam nut under the cap to keep the screw from walking outward. Just in case, I wrecked the threads to keep the nuts from walking off the end, too; you can see the gouge just above the nut.
The black knobs on our black-front Kenmore stove have slightly raised pointer extensions. At a glance, you cannot tell whether the knob points upward to OFF or downward to 5.
Oddly, the oven temperature knob has a nice white index line engraved (well, molded) in the pointer extension. So it’s not like they didn’t know how to do index lines. I’m guessing they had to take a buck out of the build cost and omitting four index lines added up to just the right amount.
I added tape markers shortly after we got the thing. The previous tape was fluorescent orange; the adhesive lasts several years before turning gummy. These new markers are snippets of outdoor-rated retroreflective tape and should last longer.
Run the knobs through the dishwasher occasionally to get ’em nice & shiny. Surprisingly, that doesn’t seem to bother the tape.
The trick to measuring small capacitance values is to get your body out of the loop: this fixture holds a crystal rigidly and makes solid contacts to both the case and leads while measuring the internal crystal-to-case capacitance. It’s sized for wire-terminated HC-49/U and HC-49/US cases, but you could obviously adapt it to other cases.
The meter is an AADE L/C Meter IIB, with binding posts on 3/4″ centers. The post caps are plastic, so the only reliable connection is on the bottom surface. I used double-sided 62-mil PCB material for the fixture base plate, with copper-foil tape wrapped around the sides and soldered along the top edge; the adhesive is allegedly conductive, but I suspect that’s for static dissipation and shielding, rather than for actually conducting signal current. Kapton tape over the copper foil prevents gashes on the sharp edges.
Notes:
Run a 1/8″ end mill across (both sides of!) the PCB and drill 1/4″ holes with a step drill at the appropriate spots.
A 25-mil brass shim stock rectangle soldered to the right half supports the crystal case to get the flange off the board.
Slice up an alligator clip with a Dremel cutoff wheel, drill a hole in the board to mount it with the screw that’s supposed to secure its wire, and it’ll hold crystal cans down with grim determination.
A snippet of phosphor bronze spring stock, bent in a slight arc with a tab soldered to the board at the far end, holds the crystal leads against the PCB. You could probably use brass shim stock.
The black strip on the far side of the binding posts is half of a wire-wrap IC socket, leads bent & clipped appropriately, then soldered to the underside foil. That’s where you stick crystals to measure their lead-to-lead capacitance (aka Co or C0). Works fine for through-hole caps, too.
A detail view…
Crystal Capacitance Fixture – Detail
Typical crystal case-to-lead capacitance is on the order of a few pF, so zeroing the fixture capacitance is important: (meter + fixture) weighs in at about 6 pF.
There’s another half pF of crystal-lead-to-fixture capacitance that’s nullable by positioning the cap leads just over the spring contact when zeroing the meter.
There’s essentially no stray capacitance due to a crystal in the socket strip along the back; zeroing the meter without the crystal seems to be adequate.
I find that pressing the Zero button with a screwdriver while bracing the other side of the case with another screwdriver gives the best results; doing it with fingers produces about +0.5 pF offset.
Done right, the meter reads within ±0.03 pF of zero and remains stable as long as you stay away while reading the digits!
I’m building a crystal parameter measurement fixture and decided to use Manhattan wiring, rather than an etched circuit board, because I think this will be a rarely used gadget… and it’s RF, so air-wiring is a Good Thing.
The key to Manhattan construction is having a pile of little circuit-board pads that you glue to a ground plane, then solder component leads to the pads. A bit of rummaging turned up an old leather punch / snap crimping tool that’s probably older than I am. After punching a few pads, though, I realized that the die hole had a constant diameter: no relief behind the cutting edge.
Aligning to the die
That meant the circuit board pads jammed tight in the hole. Extracting them required a pin punch and far more hammering than seemed reasonable, not to mention far more force to operate the punch than I was willing to apply.
So I found the largest transfer punch that would fit in the die hole, chucked it in the drill press, and aligned the table so the vise grabbed the tool directly in line with the spindle.
The tool is soft steel, intended for leather, so I could get away with the next step: chuck up a drill a few mils larger than the die hole and drill it out to within about 1/8 inch of the cutting edge.
Worked like a champ: the pads no longer jammed in the hole and the tool operated with much less force.
Nevertheless, I shrank some glue-lined heat stink shrink tubing around the handles to cushion the sharp inner edges. The handles are just folded steel, as nobody expected the retraction stroke to require much effort at all.
Padded handles
That helped a lot, as did a few drops of oil in the obvious spots.
The end result was a pile of punchies poked from a chunk of 32-mil double-sided circuit board.
The classic failure mode for a Palm Zire 71 is to stop charging. This might happen when the lithium-ion battery craps out and needs replacing, but the flex circuit between the cradle connector and the main board seem to go bad around that time, too. That’s what eventually killed my first Zire, so after I stuffed a new battery in the second, I tried fixing the first.
Here’s the flex circuit in its natural habitat (photo from the second Zire).
Flex Circuit and Components
Here’s a picture looking down along the inside edge of the connector at the the flex circuit in the photo above. Notice the cracks at the junction of the soldered terminals and the copper flex traces. Click the pic for more detail…
Cracked Flex Traces
I suspect some of those cracks came from my ham-fisted repairs over the years of owning the thing, but the fact of the matter is that many other owners who didn’t take their Zire apart have much the same charging / USB problems. I think the connector moves slightly when it’s jammed into the charging cradle and that’s enough to fracture those joints over the course of a few years.
Anyhow, cutting the flex just beyond the connector pins and scraping off the insulating layer with a sharp razor knife reveals the traces.
Flex Traces Exposed
This end of the flex circuit has two additional ground traces bracketing the 16 traces leading to the exposed connector pins. As a result, the connector body is firmly grounded. The fat trace on the top is a paired ground conductor. The fat trace in the middle is another ground.
Here are some of the connections at the other end of the circuit, where it plugs into the Zire PCB. Note that the shutter button traces wind up in the midst of all the traces with numbers corresponding to the external connector pinout found there. The speaker traces lie outside the ground at the bottom edge of the picture above.
Flex connector pinout at main PCB
With that in hand, I untwisted a hunk of stranded hookup wire to get some fine copper wires and soldered them to the flex circuit traces. Note that the two outermost traces are soldered directly to the metal shell around the alignment / latch holes. The red stuff at the very end of the flex circuit is orange nail polish that will, in theory, keep the new wires from shorting to the copper shield layer in the flex. The silvery shape at the lower middle is the shutter button.
New Leads in Place
The wires turned out to be just slightly too long; were I to do it again, I’d pay more attention to getting the edge of the flex exactly where it was when I cut it off.
A layer of Kapton tape insulates and stabilizes the wires. A layer of copper foil tape atop the Kapton gets soldered to the connector shell for static dissipation, but I’m not convinced it was necessary. This view is from the other side of the flex, with more nail polish along the edge to glue things down.
Flex with Nail Polish on Kapton
A layer of Kapton on that side pretty well finished it off; I took some pains to press the two adhesive layers together around each of the wires.
Solder the speaker back in place and reinstall in reverse order, folding the new wires gently into position. That’s when I found out they were a few millimeters too long. I left ’em be.
Here’s the final result, minus the shutter button and bezel.
Repaired Flex in Place
From this point, all the bits fit back together the way they used to.
While all this was going on, I won a pair of Zire 71s on eBay, plus a wireless keyboard (which solves a problem I don’t have), plus a known-bad Z22 (dead digitizer), plus a bunch of other odds and ends, for a whopping $25 delivered. I was so hot to get the pair that I even upped my bid to $45… there were no other bidders.
Now I have a cold backup for the hot backup for my PDA!
Amazingly enough, the (presumably OEM) batteries in the new-to-me Zires charged up and work fine, so I need not meddle with them for a year or two.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 