Adruino is here !

Today my arduino uno arrived in the mail !
It is quite the neat little unit. I've created a simple circuit with an LED connected in series with a resistor, one end to ground and one to pin 13 as described in the sample code. The simple program initializes the port and then flashes the LED writing high and low signals to the pin with delays between each.
It's going to be fun playing with this unit. 5 analog pins and 13 digital pins should give quite enough room for a lot of experiments.

-Colin.

ThinkHaus new member: Me!

Tonight I became a new member of ThinkHaus
I met the bulk of the active users tonight, they are a great group with a lot of knowledge to share. It's good to see a group of people who enjoy the same level of hardware and software making and hacking that I do. It looks like it's going to be a fun time.
There is an ardiuno course coming up this weekend, free for members and $20 for non members. Looking forward to checking it out and learning some microprocessor programming.

That's it for now, just a quick blurb for today.
-Colin.

Reviving a dead LCD

I was walking past the garbage area at work last week and spotted a 17" Dell LCD sitting on the ground. After talking with our internal IT support tech he confirmed that it was dead and was going to be tossed out as they just got a replacement in. He said it was all mine if I could fix it, so back to my desk it went.

The screen powered on no problem and gave a picture but only for about 2-3 seconds.
I suspected some bad capacitors as it seemed like something was either not storing a charge or something was shorted and pulling a signal to ground.
Today I took it apart and my suspicions were confirmed. Bad capacitors.

Here they are once removed from the board. You can see them slightly bulging and one is just starting to leak.

This little guy is completely gone.

 

Here I've begun to take them off the board. I always label each part on any board I repair along with polarity if it isn't already marked. This board had the negative pole indicated, it only needed the part value. Over the years of repairs I've learned that this is a very very important step. Trying to figure out what part goes where after the fact can take twice as long as the repair itself.

A bit of searching through my parts bin turned up an old board from a printer with just the capacitors I needed. 470uf/25v. The 220uf/100v I had in my regular parts drawer.
I de-soldered them from the board and prepped them for the LCD power supply.

  



When I was taking the shell apart I accidentally cut the line to the front buttons. A little thin wire and some solder and it's all back in working order. I cleaned up the wiring with some heat shrink on each line but forgot to take a photo of it after I buttoned it all back up.
The LCD is now alive !

  

The original stand was used at work with the replacement LCD, so it's time for a little DIY solution.

I had some scrap MDF left over from a failed project idea, so I found the best fitting parts, cut all the knobbly bits off, measured the back mount and cut it all to fit. It's not the prettiest stand but it's functional.

All in all this was a great quick project that accomplished two major things.
1) It saved another piece of "junk" from the landfill or recyclers.
2) I now have a working secondary LCD.

Total cost: $0

-Colin.