This small LED torch came in for recycling. The batteries were stuffed. Cleaned the battery contacts and put some new ones in. It worked but not very well. It would flicker especially if the case was pressed. I took it apart, squirted some contact cleaner in the switch but it would still flicker. And then I noticed something.
The tab from the battery contact was shorting out to the LED PCB. It is thin metal so it bends easily. Either it was not bent down properly in the factory or it moved when the batteries were changed.
It was easily fixed. I bent the tab down and put a little patch of adhesive foam over it. We now have yet another torch that we can use and another item is saved from being recycled.
Some manufacturers are just not learning from past manufacturing mistakes. Or they just don’t care about how long the stuff they make will last.
One of the faults with some electronic equipment is a glue used in manufacturing that becomes conductive with age (or age and heat). I first found out about it back in the 1990s when I was repairing CRT computer monitors at Phillips Electronics. It caused all sorts of faults.
Fast forward to the 2020s and there is still problems with conductive glue. Here is the insides of a Digistar DS-612T set top box.
Glenn is testing the faulty set top box.
The unit appeared dead but it eventually produced a display but that was about all. There is conductive glue in the power supply and around a logic ic. We got readings as low as about 1.5MΩ which will cause problems in any high impedance circuits.
Had a no name brand battery charger come in for recycling. I set it up on the bench to test it. It powered up but after a bit it turned off. I took the thing apart. Pretty easy to do. Four screws at each end holding the slit extrusion case together and one holding a couple of TO220 packaged devices in place. The earthing was far from ideal. It was just tucked under a self tapping screw and none of the paint had been removed.
So of course the thing will not play up with the covers off! I set it up with a battery to check the charging. That all looked good.
(I’d better not mention here that I put the battery on with reverse polarity and blew the output fuse. Hey, I blame the fact that I did not have a black jumper lead. Yeah right!)
I moved it a bit to look at the front panel and there was a spark and it stopped working! “Oh s**t!” I thought to myself “what have I shorted out?”. Powered it up again and it still did not work. Better do some fault tracing. And then it sparked again. Ha! It is sparking in the Faston style connector. I was lucky that it had one of the clear insulating boots over it so I could easily see the sparking.
The connector had been crimped but the wire gauge was too small for the connector so they just soldered them. In this case there is a big solder blob that got nowhere near the wire. So it was a very loose connection.
Not only did they cut corners with thin wires but they also threw these things together really quickly. The solder hardly melted before they moved on to the next one. And there was probably no quality control or burn in testing.
Such a shame.
I did a decent job of soldering it and then added some proper earthing.
The electronics repair industry in New Zealand has been in decline for the past two or three decades for various reasons including the flood of cheap commodity goods, poor support from the manufacturers, and rapidly changing technology.
One indication of the decline of the repair industry is the plight of component suppliers. The company that I first worked for, TESA (an abbreviation of Television Engineers and Supplies Associates), has been subsumed into Lacklands. And now, as of last month, Trade Tech, one of the other large component suppliers, has gone into liquidation.
The annoying thing is that I placed an order for some parts with them not knowing that they were in liquidation. Only three parts out of an order of ten turned up. I am still waiting for the remaining seven after about three weeks. I might not see the rest of the parts.
In Hong Kong they have electronics repair shops next to the footpath. Here in New Zealand most of suburban radio and television repair shops closed down years ago. Image: Wikimedia Commons.
A Philips 42TA2800 LCD TV came in for recycling.
“It works” the customer said, “It is just the power switch.”
The actual plastic power switch actuator was missing and you could see that the power switch circuit board was just dangling off the cables. It looks like they were poking the pcb mounted power switch (two in series) to get it to turn on. I don’t think they had the remote control for it.
After taking it apart I discovered this:
The power switch circuit board is positioned to try and show the lack of a second screw ever having been present in the plastic support.
There was ever only one screw holding the power switch circuit board in place. The other was never fitted! So the plastic support broke. Not surprisingly. This is a power switch. Something that is often abused. And in this case it had to do a lot of work because of the lack of a remote.
So what happened here Philips? Are these TVs not made in highly automated factories with all sorts of quality checking including the use of image recognition? So did this one slip past the inspections? Or is this inbuilt obsolescence? Or are you saving one screw and one extra assembly operation to save a fraction of a cent?
Get back to me on it please Philips. Thanks.
Anyway, talking about customers and switches and faults brought back some memories. When the customer said “It is just the switch” I was reminded of my days repairing the old school CRT monitors and the even earlier days of repairing CRT TVs. Customers would sometimes give their diagnosis as “It is just the switch” or “One of the guns has gone”. It got the stage where I thought customers think that a CRT TV or monitor only consists of a CRT and a switch! They don’t know that there are power supplies, HV stages, signal processing circuits all containing resistors, capacitors, semiconductors, wires, cables, connections etc and all of which can fail.
I was reading the sales blurb for the ASUS Vivobook X556UQ and one of the things that is announced as a really cool thing is the short circuit protection for the battery.
I had to laugh!
It would be really stupid and irresponsible to NOT have short circuit protection for the battery. Lithium ion batteries can put out enough current to cause fires. Take the recent recall of the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 for instance. They had some sort of battery fault that caused some of them to catch fire and Samsung ended up recalling millions of phones although in this case a short circuit protection may not have helped because it may have been a fault internal to the battery.
So ASUS, you may fool the general public into thinking that short circuit protection is a good thing but you ain’t going to fool the techies!
For a few years now I have been running Ubuntu 14.0.0 on an old Toshiba Satellite A100 laptop (from the Microsoft Windows XP era). It was sort of as an experiment but it was also because I like to keep the old stuff operational for as long as possible. Linux operating systems are less resource hungry compared to the offerings from Microsoft and so the good old Toshiba did everything you would expect from a much newer computer.
There were a few issues though. It would run quite hot for one. I don’t know if the hardware did not like to be pushed too hard with playing full screen videos, or that there was a problem with the thermal management, lack of Ubuntu drivers, or all three issues.
The lack of integration with Microsoft products also made using a Linux based operating system a little awkward.
For a little while the laptop had developed a fault where the screen would flicker or briefly disappear and then the cursor could be moved but clicking did nothing. Also, it would sometimes not wake up after going into standby. It seemed to be a fault that was related to movement of the motherboard. I had stripped it down after it started happening but there was no obvious cause. As is often the case for these faults it stopped playing up for a while after being checked.
The intermittent fault was getting a little worse but then one evening, quite suddenly, the laptop stopped charging. Oh, and I forgot to mention that the battery was pretty well stuffed and the charger had to be plugged in virtually all the time. I did all the usual things a technician does. I checked the charger. No problems there. So I stripped down the laptop and started doing some fault tracing. The two fuses were ok, the low ohm resistors were ok, the coils were ok but one looked like it had been running hot.
And then I noticed this:
Looks like the magic smoke escaped from the chip.
Looks like the chip is toast and pretty much so is the whole laptop. The chip is close to the hard drive connector but the hard drive was still working. Interesting. It does not matter if the hard drive is stuffed because everything that is important is on the cloud.
Time to dig another laptop out of the recycling pile. I found a Toshiba Satellite M300 that looks like it only needed an LCD cable. Cheap enough on Aliexpress so I ordered one. Another laptop that was kicking around was a HP G60 that had been running Windows 7. It had a stuffed hard drive.
Now I know from past experience that you cannot pull a hard drive out of one machine and just bung it into another one and expect it to work. There are all sorts of driver issues. To possibly make things easy and as an experiment I thought I might try to drop the hard drive out of the Toshiba straight into the HP. And guess what! It worked! I am typing this blog post minutes after the transplant! The only thing I had to do differently is to enter the wireless password. I have struck this before. It seems that the wireless password is stored in hardware somewhere rather than on the hard drive.
So is this all an indication of how good the generic Linux drivers are? It is not really a security issue since I still had to enter my login password. So is this the way of the future where we pull the solid state hard drive out of a stuffed old machine and bung it in a new one? Sounds like a good idea to me.
In a referendum on 23 June 2016 the voting public of the UK chose to leave the EU with 52% wanting to leave and 48% wanting to remain. This will possibly have implications on addressing the many negative environmental and social effects of electrical, electronics, and computer technology.
The EU has long been on the global forefront of policies that promote sustainable technologies. One of the earlier Directives draw up by the European Economic Community on limiting waste led to a Directive on battery recycling. Anecdotal evidence from European tourists in New Zealand suggest that it has produced a culture of battery recycling. The tourists are astounded that there is no means of easily having their batteries recycled while in New Zealand. Amongst other things the EU is now working on policies that include trying to address conflict minerals and developing the idea of a Circular Economy.
Thanks to the EU the Micro B USB plug is now a common standard on phones, tablets, and e-book readers.
EU policies have had a global reach. Here in New Zealand I can think of two that have had an effect. One of them would be noticed by electronics engineers and technicians every time they order a part since they are often specified with the RoHS compliance information. RoHS is the EU Restriction of Hazardous Substances Directive limiting the levels of toxic materials contained in products.
Another effect of the EU, which many people can see on a daily basis, is the micro B USB connector used on a large number of mobile phones and other portable electronic devices. As an attempt to reduce the environmental impact of the large number of incompatible chargers the EU proposed a Directive to force standardisation onto the manufacturers. Most of the manufacturers banded together and responded by developing a Memorandum of Understanding to hamonise portable device charges based on the micro B USB connector.
In correspondence earlier this year with the Minister for the Environment Nick Smith said that there are no plans at present to emulate EU policies such as reducing hazardous materials contained in products (as per the EC RoHS), identification and the possible ban of the importation of conflict minerals, development of a Circular Economy, priority product status, producer responsibility, or product stewardship for electrical, electronic, and computer devices (addition to what is currently being done), adopting a universal charging standard for mobile devices, mandatory battery recycling, or adoption of an Integrated Product Policy. As a country we are at least twenty five years behind the EU in terms of technology related environmental policy and this is another black mark against so called clean green New Zealand.
Because it is a significant player an exit by the UK from the EU waters down the the strength of the EU bloc and there is also a possibility that other countries may follow. Given the level of disruption, the level of dissatisfaction with the referendum result, and that it is nonbinding it is possible that a Brexit may not actually happen.
With the global environmental, social, and economic issues with which we face there is a strong need for a supranational organisation with governance that is acceptable to every nation-state.
In a referendum on 23 June 2016 the voting public of the UK chose to leave the EU with 52% wanting to leave and 48% wanting to remain. This will possibly have implications on addressing the many negative environmental and social effects of electrical, electronics, and computer technology.