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Surface Mount Soldering: Repair Harmony 659

My friend Trent gave me a pair of broken Logitech Harmony 659 remotes. I bought into the programmable universal remote ages ago when I purchased a Pronto TSU 2000 – a remote I still use regularly to drive my home theater. I’ve watched with interest the Harmony remotes become more popular and lower cost and have often encouraged people to consider getting them. Having a remote control that everyone in your family can understand how to use means better use of the audio / video system you have. I was really pleased to get these two remotes and figured I could fix both of them.

The first step is opening the remote. There are four screws indicated by the green circles in the picture at the top of this post. Two of the screws are inside the battery compartment. Then there are 6 tabs the clip the top and bottom together – indicated with blue circles. A putty knife and some gentle pressure should get the remote apart without any damage. For things like this it’s important to take your time and be persistent (but not too forceful).

I have two broken remotes. One has a non-responsive keyboard, the other has the USB connector busted off the circuit board. It would probably be fairly simple to combine the two into a single working remote, but that would be taking the easy way out. In the picture above you can see the broken off mini-USB connector. One of the pads has come off the circuit board entirely and the remainder have broken lose of the solder connections. I suspect this failure was a combination of a poor soldering job at the factory, and accidental use of extra force on the connector in normal use.

Prior to doing this repair I had not done any surface mount (SMD) soldering. I went to youtube to learn a few of the techniques for how to do this successfully. I wasn’t working quite at the same scale as is possible, but this was well beyond doing a single pin at a time. Basically the technique is to spread some flux, and drag a loaded soldering iron tip over the pins.

I’ve got a reasonably nice soldering iron now, but I lacked many of the other useful tools such as a a flux pen or loupe. I did have handy some flux I’ve used for soldering copper pipe and a toothpick to apply it with. It worked fine – but don’t do as I did. It turns out that “Kester SP-30 is too corrosive for electrical or electronics soldering applications“. Ok, well lesson learned about making do – I’ll have to see what I can do about cleaning any residual flux off the board.

Above you’ll see the result of my first attempt. From a distance it appears to be all good. However, with a bright LED flashlight and my digital camera with 20x optical zoom told a different story.

Close, but not quite. There is some visible bridging of the solder between the pins. So clearly this wasn’t going to work and I needed to start over.

I used some solder wick to remove the old solder. This is a fine copper braid that you heat up in contact with the solder and it sucks up the solder and leaves a clean connection. I should have done this from the start – cleaning off all of the old solder. The result was nice clean solder pads ready for another try.

This time no bridging, just enough solder to get a contact and no more. It’s not as pretty as I’d like it to have been but it appears to work just fine. While this was a bit finicky, it wasn’t really that hard to do. I’ll be a lot braver about dealing with SMD parts in the future.

Initially I had some problems getting it to appear under Linux. I was able to A/B test the other broken unit (bad keypad) as it has a working USB port (very nice to have more than one to do comparisons with). So I started thinking that maybe there was a problem with my soldering work after all. Then I found some instructions on getting the remote into “safe mode”: With no batteries installed, hold the OFF button, plug in USB connection to computer. Once I did this, the remote did show up just fine under Linux. The only weird thing was that after the one time, it showed up even when I didn’t invoke “safe mode” – maybe that caused something to get reset? Before you think your Harmony is broken, try “safe mode” – it might just fix things for you.

I did flip over to Windows XP to run the Harmony software to actually program the remote. Later I may experiment with the Linux solution for working with the Harmony remotes.

BlackBerry Bold 9700: JVM Error 102

My brother in-law’s BlackBerry 9700 suffered a new problem this time JVM Error 102. A quick google search turns up more 600,000 results – so this is I assume a pretty common problem. In his case it seems entirely random – he had it plugged in to charge and when he went to unplug it, it was stuck on an all white screen with JVM Error 102 with one choice: reboot. It seemed the device was stuck in a reboot cycle, always hitting the same error.

I followed the instructions on this page, but I’ll also repeat them here to cover exactly what I did. Sadly this requires a Windows machine (I used XP).

If you don’t already have the BlackBerry Desktop Software installed and running, you’ll need that. If you’ve never had the BlackBerry connected to your Windows machine, it may also need to install some USB drivers, my Windows XP was able to figure out what was needed automatically. Hopefully you’ll be in a state as shown in the picture at the top of this post, able to see the device but not able to do anything.

Now you need the JL_cmder utility. The utility is just a script driving the JavaLoader program. With the BlackBerry Desktop Software running, also run this script. If you are having trouble with this part, I’d advise you to stop trying to solve this yourself and get some help. You’ll need to be comfortable with command line programs to succeed.

If you see some output like the following when using JL_cmder:

Then you’ve probably failed as I had to install the BlackBerry Desktop Software, or it isn’t running, or you’ve got a driver problem, or maybe there is a more serious problem with your BlackBerry. Once I had installed and was running the BlackBerry Desktop Software this problem went away for me.

Now you want to grab the eventlog. This will open a notepad with the contents of your log. In my case there had been many failed boots, so the error was repeated many times. Here is the last complete entry:

guid:0x97C9F5F641D25E5F time: Wed Dec 31 19:00:00 1969 severity:0 type:2 app:System data:System Startup guid:0x97C9F5F641D25E5F time: Wed Dec 31 19:00:00 1969 severity:0 type:2 app:System data:VM:FSNHv=1 guid:0x97C9F5F641D25E5F time: Wed Dec 31 19:00:00 1969 severity:0 type:2 app:System data:VM:CVER=5.0.0.351 guid:0x97C9F5F641D25E5F time: Wed Dec 31 19:00:00 1969 severity:0 type:2 app:System data:VM:PSIDv=266951 guid:0x97C9F5F641D25E5F time: Wed Dec 31 19:00:00 1969 severity:0 type:2 app:System data:CMM: verifyHash failed for net_rim_device_apps_games_wordmole_graphics_480x360-6(3437) guid:0x97C9F5F641D25E5F time: Wed Dec 31 19:00:00 1969 severity:0 type:2 app:System data:VM:+BORK guid:0x97C9F5F641D25E5F time: Wed Dec 31 19:00:00 1969 severity:0 type:2 app:System data:JVM Error 102 guid:0x97C9F5F641D25E5F time: Wed Dec 31 19:00:00 1969 severity:0 type:2 app:System data:Invalid code in filesystem guid:0x97C9F5F641D25E5F time: Wed Dec 31 19:00:00 1969 severity:0 type:2 app:System data:JVM:INFOp=21e0b6b1,a='5.0.0.351',o='5.1.0.98',h=4001507

You can see there is a verifyHash failure in the log, I’ve marked the file name of the offending file in bold (your log won’t have the bold marking in it – that’s your job, to identify the problematic file). So there isn’t any good reason this file was corrupted and not another, but luckily it is clearly a non-critical file. I was amused by the appearance of the Unix epoc in the log file.

Now that we know what the problem is, we’ll just remove the file. I’ll stress that the filename is going to be unique to your problem. Reading the error log is a critical step. Using a command shell we’ll execute the following:

JavaLoader.exe -u erase -f net_rim_device_apps_games_wordmole_graphics_480x360-6

Doing this caused the device to reboot. If it doesn’t reboot on it’s own, you might need to manually reboot/reset the device. That’s it you’re done – you should have a working BlackBerry at this point.

Follow up steps – you should synchronize with the desktop software to back up your device. It may be wise to push a firmware upgrade to the device, even the same version you had (assuming you were fully up to date) – this will replace all other files which may have been corrupted. I didn’t do this, but I’d hope the desktop software makes this a straight-forward process.

Kingston RAM

RAM is one of the most important aspects of your computer system, but spending a lot on fast RAM is usually not worth it – better to get more RAM that is cheaper. I’ll frequently just buy whatever is cheapest that meets the specs I need.

Back in 2006 when I bought a refurbished Mac Mini (G4) from Apple it came with 512MB of RAM. The PPC Mini was limited to a single RAM slot, and 512MB was ok – but not really enough.

For Macs there was RAM specially tagged as compatible, or I could go the aftermarket route and just buy some RAM with the same specifications. If my memory is correct, the price delta was 30% or so. In the end, even at the premium price (about $100) the 1Gb of RAM I needed wasn’t a huge expense so I went for the guaranteed to work. The memory arrived, it worked fine until just recently.

The mini stopped booting, running a memory test resulted in it indicating the RAM was bad (I thought maybe the hard drive had gone). As Kingston has a lifetime warranty I figured it was worth seeing if I could get a free replacement (vs. a $30 price for a new unit at todays RAM cost).

Wow! Kingston’s support/warranty process is amazingly good.

I called and almost immediately got a real live person. It was really hassle free, they asked why I thought the RAM was bad and I said I had run a self test on it – and that was it. I was immediately in line for a RMA #.

The RMA process is really slick. Once you get the right documentation from Kingston (via email!) – you only need to package the RAM and drop it off at a FedEx location. Kingston picks up the cost of shipping it both ways.

The shipping was fast (and free to me):
Oct 4, 2011 9:45 AM Delivered FOURNTAN VALLEY, CA Oct 4, 2011 8:57 AM On FedEx vehicle for delivery COSTA MESA, CA Oct 4, 2011 8:03 AM At local FedEx facility COSTA MESA, CA Oct 4, 2011 5:59 AM In transit LOS ANGELES, CA Oct 4, 2011 4:04 AM Departed FedEx location INDIANAPOLIS, IN Oct 4, 2011 2:04 AM International shipment release INDIANAPOLIS, IN Oct 4, 2011 12:27 AM Arrived at FedEx location INDIANAPOLIS, IN Oct 3, 2011 10:44 PM In transit MIRABEL, PQ Oct 3, 2011 8:04 PM In transit OTTAWA, ON Oct 3, 2011 6:23 PM Left FedEx origin facility OTTAWA, ON Oct 3, 2011 5:16 PM Picked up OTTAWA, ON

A brand new stick of RAM arrived on my doorstep on October 12th (again via FedEx). It was amusingly over packaged (as you can tell from the photo at the top of this post). Of course it works perfectly.

Sure I paid Kingston a premium form Mac specific RAM, but that was back in 2006. To get such red carpet service 5 years after I bought something is really amazing. Their warranty also covers the regular ValueRAM etc, so you should get similar great service. They usually have very good pricing on their RAM, but given my experience with the warranty even if they aren’t the best price it will be tempting to spend a few bucks more to get Kingston.