Category: Gadgets

Squeezebox Classic Repair

I’ve had a Squeezebox Classic (Squeezebox 3) for a couple of years, and over that time I’ve been very happy with the functionality and quality of the device. I’m glad that through the transition to Logitech they’ve managed to remain successful in their niche, and I still recommend them to folks looking for a quality media player.

You can’t buy the Squeezebox 3 anymore, but the Squeezebox Touch appears to be the closest comparable product. If that’s not audiophile enough for you, there is always the Transporter. More important than the media player is the encoding format you select for your music (nothing is going to make 64k MP3s sound good). Squeezebox supports FLAC if you’re really serious, and high bitrate MP3s are no sweat either. It also supports non-DRM Apple format (AAC), Ogg Vorbis and a host of others.

I’m a little back level on the server software, but it has been consistently good. The web interface is reasonable and there are some fairly good remote control apps for the iPhone and Android. I run the software on my file server, but there are ways of getting this running on various NAS units as well which is a nice combination.

For various reasons the Squeezebox is at toddler level in our family room. This means over the last few months it has endured countless drops onto the floor. It seemed to handle these well, but the other day I noticed the screen was dark and it was no longer on the network. Initial attempts to reset / reboot the device failed to make any difference. When power was applied to the device, you’d see the TOSLink connector light up (see picture at top of this post), but that was about it. So I had to open it up.

Inside the unit was very clean, and I didn’t notice any soldering quality issues that others had mentioned in the forums. Unfortunately, my first visit inside the box didn’t reveal any actual problems so it ended up sitting on the shelf waiting for me to find some time to investigate further.

Tonight I discovered what was wrong, I should also credit this forum thread for helping me. There is the main circuit board, and mounted on that is a daughter card. Slotted into that daughter card is the wifi card (you can see this stack of cards in the picture above). Apparently the unit will work without the wifi card installed, and it is a part that goes bad for some. I am glad mine is still working, but I run my device over wire anyways. What I didn’t realize the 1st time I looked was the daughter card had become separated from the main circuit board.

Just to the left of my finger tip, you can see a rectangular white connector. I’m holding the board slightly up to show a separation between the two connectors. This is how the daughter card connects to the main board. To help you visualize the orientation, the RCA connector(s) are where the black box is to the right of my finger.

Here is a second shot of the daughter card properly installed. If you look carefully you can see the rectangular connectors are well mated. That was all it took to fix things up. You’ll need a torx t10 or similar screwdriver to open up the device. There are 2 screws securing the cover, then a further 4 inside holding the main board to the case.

How to: Cleaning a Nokia 5310

While the Nokia 5310 hasn’t been my daily phone in over a year, it remains one of my favorites. It is very small, the voice quality is good, a nice loud speaker phone, and the battery lasts week. It’s not a smart phone, but it has some nice features like mp3 playback and MIDP application support. Unfortunately being carted everywhere in my pocket meant it picked up some lint / dust that managed to get between the LCD screen and the external cover / faceplate. Mostly when the screen was on, this wasn’t a big deal – but in certain lighting conditions it was very obvious.

Nearly a year ago I set out to figure out how to take the phone apart and clean it. It wasn’t hard to find a site describing replacement of the keypad that gave enough instructions to strip the phone down. Of course, it took me nearly a year to get around to doing this. I was somewhat motivated by wanting to put it up for sale on eBay, figuring a clean phone might be worth more. I ended up following some slightly different instructions, but both sites are accurate and should work for anyone wanting to disassemble a Nokia 5310.

Here is the phone in mid-disassembly. This is just after the front cover has been removed. I was surprised how full of lint / dust the phone had gotten. There is almost an organic quality to a well loved gadget (ok, maybe that much dust is just gross).

At this point I’ve managed to get the phone stripped down to the point where the LCD is separated from the outer cover. On the left you can see the faceplate (face down) and the LCD on the right along with the circuit board. Both the inside of the faceplate needed to be cleaned, as well as the LCD (which is a bit more obvious in the picture). Looking carefully you can see the foam that surrounds the faceplate, this presses up against the LCD and is intended to keep dust and stuff out. The dust seemed to mostly get in from the bottom corners of the screen. I suspect that due to button (opening) placement there just was more opportunity for dust to get in there – it is possible this is a minor defect but I doubt it.

One last shot of the phone, fully reassembled. You can see how big a difference there is when compared to the 1st photo at the top of this post. Overall I was very pleased with the results, and I did sell it on eBay just the other day.

The whole process took me about 40 minutes, maybe a bit less. Very few tools were required – I will recommend the LeeValley micro-tip screwdriver as it was very handy. Some patience is needed when removing the front cover, as well the removal of the back of the phone from the main body needed care. Work slowly and don’t force things. It really is quite impressive how compact the whole unit is. I think there was a total of 6 screws holding it all together, sort of like a high tech jigsaw puzzle.

Review: Nexus One

Recently one of the guys at work offered me his “old” Nexus One for a crazy price, so crazy I actually talked him into accepting more. I immediately wiped the ROM that was on there and installed cyanogenmod – for this review I’ll stick to my impressions based on using the Nexus One for the first couple of weeks.

First impression: Fast. So very fast. Second impression – argh, no physical keyboard – no buttons either! Then the fact that the Nexus has so much more RAM available than the G1 did starts to sink in, and the speed – did I mention it was fast? I was sold, but really hoped that the keyboard / button thing was going to quickly become a non-issue.

The headline photo is a comparison shot of the Nexus (far left), and iPhone 3G (middle) and the G1 (right). Things get interesting when we look at the side profile.

The Nexus is the thinnest of the bunch. Let’s take a look at some of the specifications

Nexus One HTC G1
CPU 1 GHz Snapdragon 528 MHz ARM11
RAM 512MB 192MB
Screen Size 3.7″ 3.2″
Resolution 480×800 320×480
Weight 130g / 4.6oz 158g / 5.6oz

Some big differences, with twice the CPU frequency and more than twice the RAM – even needing to drive the larger resolution screen isn’t going to be enough to slow it down.

After a few days I got used to the ‘soft’ buttons for home, menu, back and search. The ROM has haptic feedback (it vibrates) when you hit these buttons. Initially the back button gave me some trouble, specifically in twitter where the reply button on screen is just above the back button – I kept hitting reply instead of back. As I got more familiar with the phone this was much less of an issue.  I still manage to hit the home button when using the track ball for some reason.

Having a real headphone jack is very nice, something I really found annoying with the G1. Having the dock to charge means no messing with cables, you just drop it in. The predictive keyboard is actually quite good, and once you get used to using it – the on screen keyboard is just fine. I still sometimes miss the physical keys, but everything else on this phone is so nice I’m willing to live without them.