Gadgets – Page 9 – Roo's View

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.

Review: TPU GEL Case for HTC Desire

The NexusOne had a nice dock, however the dock really wasn’t compatible with any cases. It did have a screen protector on it (from zagg). For my (new to me) HTC Desire I have no dock, so I thought I’d get a case and a generic screen protector. I’d dropped the NexusOne once or twice and cringed as it hit the ground. No major damage was done, but I did add a dent or two.

You can see what I bought above. It was a $2.99USD from an eBay seller, shipping from HongKong included. Based on the stamps on the envelope, it cost about $0.70 postage to ship it.

The case was exactly what I expected. A slightly flexible case with all the right holes for camera, headphones and power. The power and volume buttons are covered but function well. It is a good snug fit over the phone. The case adds some bulk to the phone, but not a lot of weight. I’m still quite pleased with the case after having it on the phone a couple of days.

The case is described as TPU GEL. Thermoplastic Polyurethane (TPU) is a type of plastic, the GEL is I suspect used to describe the flexibility of the case, as there are TPU cases which are hard plastic. Jenn has a Kate Spade silicon case for her iPhone 3G and it’s quite a bit more rubbery than this one.

The use of screen protectors is almost a religious issue. I hadn’t had a phone with a screen protector until the NexusOne, and it came to me with one installed. The HTC Desire does have Gorilla Glass on it, however it isn’t immune to small nicks and scratches.

Hopefully you can see the numerous small nicks on the screen in the picture above. You didn’t see them in normal lighting conditions, but the were there. I figured for the price, I couldn’t really go too wrong.

The screen protector is the typical generic screen protector. They include a small cleaning cloth as well. The instructions read a little like engrish, but are understandable. The screen is by no means anti-glare, the resulting finish is high gloss and I did have a few minor bubbles. Compared to the zagg which had a very distinctive feel to it, this one feels just like the bare screen.

I ran into the usual problems when applying the screen protector. The first film you take off exposes the sticky adhesive that will bind the screen protector to the phone. Of course it will pick up every free dust particle in the area – and even a grain of dust will show up as a bubble on the screen. Using the dusting cloth too close to the adhesive is a great way to get more stuff stuck to it. I found that the corner of the protective film used as a pick was useful for clearing dust bits out of the way – even off the adhesive.

One tip I may try in future is to do this in the bathroom. Run the shower to make the room a bit steamy, this will reduce airborne dust. Then make sure you’ve got good bright lighting and go to it. If you can get it perfectly aligned the first time that’s best, the more you mess with it – the more you are dealing with small bubbles. Large bubbles can be worked out prior to removal of the 2nd film.

Looking at the final product of my efforts below, you can see a number of imperfections in the application. Dust trapped below the screen protector as well as a few circular artifacts which are air bubbles. The screen protector also didn’t quite seal down in a couple of corners (likely where I handled it too much). None of the imperfections are highly visible in normal usage.

Apparently Steve Jobs had commented (on iPod’s) that stainless steel looks beautiful when it wears, and I have to agree. The rate at which I seem to change phones lately (about once a year) it is unlikely that I really need to worry about protecting the device all that much. Without any case or screen protection, it is likely this phone will last the 3 years or so before it is completely obsolete – I’ll still feel much better the next time I drop it onto the pavement.