Bartman's Blob

Got a cheapo third part Olympus camera battery charger powered by USB that got damaged. The microUSB connector on the charger was dislodge from the PCB due to rough handling. I think part of the reason why it got dislodged is because of the way the microUSB is secured on the PCB. The microUSB connector lacks sufficient retention. Even though the charger has this minor flaw, charging the battery using USB power is still an attractive option verse those that runs on AC mains. That’s why I went ahead to try to save this charger. Opening up the casing was quite easy. There are 4 screws holding down the back cover. 2 of the screw are covered by the label. Removing the 2 screws underneath the labels will also release the top cover to allow access to the PCB. After a few blobs of solder and counter checking of the microUSB connector connections with a multimeter, the board is repaired. After replacing the cover and testing it again by plugging in power ...

It’s time for another disassembly post. This time it is a 3.5 inch TFT LCD monitor. It is one of those monitor that you connect to your car’s reverse camera. This monitor runs on DC 12V and it does not have any onboard buttons, not even a power on button. If you are interested, they are still available on Aliexpress . But since this is a very old model, you can get yourself a larger screen size monitor for about the same price. You can check it out HERE . Now, let’s take a look at the insides of the monitor. There’s two screws securing the back cover. Simply unscrew these two self-tapping screws and we are in. There’s two major components, the main board and the LCD module underneath the main board. I did not remove the main board as glued to the front panel. Here’s a close up of the main board for those who might be interested. That’s it for now..

This is a wired remote for Canon DSLR camera.  It's used on the Canon 1D, 30D, 40, 50D, 7D etc.  This cheap generic canon RS-80N3 wired remote has failed on me after about 2 to 3  years of infrequent use. Pressing the button did not create any response on the camera. I suspect there could be an open circuit somewhere in the remote.  The plug on this cheap remote are also very loose when connected to the camera. I found out that this cheap remote’s plug is lacking an additional outer ring that helps the plug to fit snugly into the camera’s remote socket. Here's a quick side by side comparison of the plugs with my Pixel wireless remote adapter cable (on the right). The wireless remote that i have is similar to this model: Since this unit is not working, let’s have a look inside the remote and see how it is put together before i throw it into the Ewaste bin. One of the unique thing about this remote is that it does not use a standard el...

Came across this Fujitsu USB optical mouse some time ago and found that it did not work correctly. The left mouse click seems to be electronically lock on the mouse controller when it is connected to a computer (windows PC). It’s seems like this mouse is destined for the recycling bin. Before I do that, I thought it would be interesting to disassemble the mouse and see if there is anything interesting inside. And here we go: Here’s the Fujitsu USB optical Mouse model HLMSE0038A-00. Here’s the bottom of the mouse. After disassembling the mouse, from the left to right: The PCB board, single self-taping screw, scroll wheel, plastic optical prism and lens and the 3 pieces of plastic mouse enclosure. A close up look at the mouse internals. Close up of the mouse PCB board(single sided board). And lastly, the PCB track layout side. Hope this will be useful to someone out there..:)

If you need to separate/demux the audio, video or both of the components without re-encoding from a mp4 file, here is a simple way to do it using the VLC player open source software (Download VLC from their official website: https://www.videolan.org/vlc/index.html ). In this example, I will be using the VLC version 3.0.1 64 bit windows version of the VLC player to perform the extraction/demux. I believe you do not need to have the same exact version in order to do this. I have tested this method using an older 2.2.4 32bit windows version and it worked fine. The following example are for audio extraction. For video extraction, it should be somewhat similar. In order to extract the original format out from the mp4, the first step is to identify what are the individual stream made of. You can use the following method to identify them.  - Load your source mp4 file into VLC player.  - From the top menu, goto Tools>Codec Information. You shoul...

This is a follow up post for my Teclast X98 air 3G battery repair post. You can check out that post here . Damaging a perfectly fine LCD panel while replacing a battery that cost a lot less …..how dumb is that… :( Before I decided to go forward in replacing the LCD panel, I did some digging on the internet but I could not find much information on the internet regarding replacement of the LCD panel for this particular tablet. After searching around for the replacement LCD panel cost and comparing the cost of getting a new tablet of a similar size, I concluded that it is more economical to take the risk to repair the tablet. Here’s the LCD panel that I bought online from taobao. You can also get them from Aliexpress . The part number for this LCD is LP097QX2 . You can search using this part number. This is the rear: Yes, there are a lot of finger prints on the back panel. This is how I received it. It is wrapped in layers of foam but the panel is not even placed in...