The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning

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

Tag: Repairs

If it used to work, it can work again

Baofeng BL-5 Battery Pack: Disassembly

Not much to my surprise, both Baofeng BL-5 lithium batteries went bad on the shelf:

Baofeng BL-5 Packs – Final Failure – 2018-02-21

The longer traces show their original capacity, back in the day.

Whacking a chisel into the obvious split lines broke the solvent glue bonds holding the case sections together, after which some slow prying defeated the double sticky foam tape on the cells:

Baofeng BL-5 battery pack – innards

A closer look at the (dis)charge controller PCB:

Baofeng BL-5 battery pack – protection PCB

The other side of the PCB has no components, so what you see is what you get. The larger IC proclaims FS8205A EP050C, which may indicate a vague relation to an S8205 protection IC. The datasheet shows a 16 pin TSSOP package containing an IC for four or five cell batteries, completely unlike the 8 pin package on the PCB, but when you buy enough of anything, you can get anything you want.

In common with all cheap lithium batteries around here, the “thermistor” terminal connects to a 10 kΩ SMD resistor steadfastly maintaining its resistance in the face of all temperature variations.

Some probing shows one feeble cell in each pack. Perhaps a Frankenbattery built from the debris will have enough capacity for a standard ride around the block.

2018-03-07
APRS/Voice HT Interface: Cap Failure

The TinyTrak3 on the Wouxun adapter wasn’t working, showing a dim red Power LED to indicate it wasn’t getting enough juice. A bit of tracing showed my adapter board provided just over 5 V to the poor thing, not the nearly 9 V it should be getting, which led me to believe the transistor switching the supply had failed. A bit more tracing, however, revealed the true problem:

Failed electrolytic cap

The schmutz on the black cap matches up with a crater in the rear of the (originally not so) brown cap.

The Little Box o’ SMD Caps revealed two nearly identical sets of 33 μF caps, one with a 6 V rating, the other with 16 V rating. Yup, when I added that cap in the hopes of reducing RFI troubles, I soldered the wrong one onto the PCB: it’s my fault!

The poor thing lasted for over six years with just under 9 V applied to it, so I can’t complain.

I removed the corpse and reassembled the box without the additional cap (and without the terminals contacting the back of the Wouxun, because reasons). If RFI turns out to be a problem, I’ll take another look at the situation.

2018-03-06
APRS/Voice HT Interface: Baofeng Mods

My carefully contrived plug plates for Wouxun radios:

Wouxun plug plate – epoxy cap

… of course don’t fit the Baofeng radio. This being in the nature of a final fix, I chopped off enough protrusions to make the remainder fit snugly into the recess.

APRS-voice HT interface – Baofeng mods

The case containing the TinyTrak3 GPS board and the APRS-voice adapter PCB of course doesn’t fit in place of the Baofeng battery pack, so I replaced the battery contact studs with simple 4-40 screws to prevent heartache & confusion.

Based on one ride, both Baofeng batteries have very little capacity left after several years on the shelf, which comes as absolutely no surprise whatsoever.

2018-03-05
Water Hardness

A water hardness test strip recently arrived from Morton Salt:

Water harness test

I call it between 7 and 15 gpg. Based on the feel of the water just before regeneration, I’d been guesstimating 15 gpg, so it’s within reason.

I’ll back the softener off to 10 gpg and see what happens.

2018-03-04
Streaming Radio Player: RPi and OLED Updates
Because the OLED driver came from the pip package manager, not the Raspberry Pi’s system-level apt package manager, it (or they, there’s plenty of code under the hood) don’t get updated whenever I do system maintenance. The doc says this should do the trick:
```
sudo -H pip install --upgrade luma.oled
```
However, it turns out the new version has a slightly longer list of pre-requisite packages, causing the update to go toes-up at a missing package:
```
Could not import setuptools which is required to install from a source distribution.
Please install setuptools.
```
So update (or install, for the new ones) the missing pieces:
```
sudo apt-get install python-dev python-pip libfreetype6-dev libjpeg-dev build-essential
```
Doing so produced a backwards-compatibility error in my Python code:
```
... change ...
from luma.core.serial import spi
... into ...
from luma.core.interface.serial import spi
```
The motivation for all this fuffing and fawing came from watching some OLEDs wake up completely blank or become garbled in one way or another. Evidently, my slower-speed SPI tweak didn’t quite solve the problem, although it did reduce the frequency of failures. I have decided, as a matter of principle, to not embrace the garble.

Soooo, let’s see how shaking all the dice affects the situation.

It’s entirely possible the OLED controllers don’t quite meet their specs, of course, or have begun deteriorating for all the usual reasons.
2018-02-28
J5-V2 Flashlight: Front End Rattle

After a year of fairly light use, the lens holder (and “attack ring”) of my J5-V2 flashlight worked loose and began to rattle. The ring holding the lens in place turned out to be finger-loose, but that wasn’t the entire problem, so I removed it and looked inside:

J5-V2 Flashlight – LED view

The mysterious alien egg resides on the upper-right side of the LED emitter.

The aluminum ring holding the LED assembly in place was also finger-loose, so I unwound it to take the whole front end apart:

J5-V2 Flashlight – front parts

Reassembly with a few dabs of Loctite in appropriate places should prevent future rattles.

Given the number of … issues … accompanying this thing, I’d say it’s not been a good cost performer. The Anker LC40 and LC90 flashlights work much better.

2018-02-25
Streaming Radio Player: OLED Garble
Even in the dim light of dawn, it’s obvious slowing the SPI clock to 1 MHz didn’t quite solve the problem:

RPi OLED display – garbled

The display started up fine, became encrypted during the next few hours, and remained garbled as the track information changed. This is almost certainly a bad SPI transfer trashing the OLED module’s control registers.

Dropping the clock to the absolute minimum of 0.5 MHz didn’t help, either:
```
serial = spi(device=0,port=0,bus_speed_hz=500000)
device = sh1106(serial)
```
This particular display woke up blank after loading the new code, then worked OK after another reset. The other streamers lit up as expected on the first try, so the slower SPI isn’t making the situation instantly worse.

Running the clock at 1 MHz definitely reduced the failure rate, which suggests it’s a glitchy thing.

Good embedded systems practice suggests resetting the entire display from scratch every now and again, but my streamer code has no concept of elapsed time. Opening that particular can o’ worms would almost certainly result in an on-screen clock and I do not want to go there.

I suppose I must get a new oscilloscope with SPI bus decoding to verify all the SPI setup and hold times …
2018-02-19