perlmonger: (sothoth remix)
[personal profile] perlmonger
[livejournal.com profile] ramtops and I have a bluetooth GPS unit we use with TomTom running on a palm. Mostly it all works as well as you’d expect, but charging the GPS has been an increasingly dodgy process - persuading the unit to notice its power cable (sometimes at home, nearly always in the car) was present has been variable.

I’d guessed the issue was likely dirty contacts (of course, we can’t find our tin of Servisol) or possibly a bent contact in the power socket and planned to investigate further when I could be arsed, but yesterday morning as [livejournal.com profile] ramtops plugged it into the house charger my attention was focused as the fault went hard with a click, and subsequent rattle when the thing was shaken.

Turns out, on opening the beast, that the manufacturers believe in the early-iPod-firewire-connector school of construction: the power connector was (emphasise was) held on by the solder its three legs sat in on the circuit board. Thankfully, it’s not surface mounted, so it was easy to reattach courtesy of careful application of soldering iron to each corresponding solder blob on the underside of the board in turn.

It’s now reattached, and will stay that way, thanks to a suitably engineered blob of Araldite. I’m still pissed off with lazy-arse design and manufacturing: the failure mode should have been blindingly obvious to anyone; I guess the bastards just bet that the thing would outlast its guarantee.

I just hope I haven’t fucked it in the fixing; I didn’t bother with earthing myself particularly. It charged overnight and now lights its LEDs in a plausible fashion, but we won’t know for sure until it’s paired with the palm and actually tested next time we go out.

ETA: it works a treat.
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perlmonger

July 2013

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