Episode: 2591
Title: HPR2591: International Troubleshooting
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2591/hpr2591.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 06:17:42

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This is HPR Episode 2591 entitled International Trouble Shooting and is part of the series
Hobby Electronics.
It is hosted by NY Wheel and is about 30 minutes long and carrying a clean flag.
The summer is, and a Wheel Trouble Shooting study I like it on Ken Fallon.
This episode of HBR is brought to you by An Honest Host.com.
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Hello, this is NY Bill and I'm back with another electronics kit.
This one's a little bit different.
It's in a package in front of me.
The kit is already built.
So how do you get a kit that's already built?
Well, you talk to your buddy Ken Fallon and you say, hey, that is a scope that you made
that didn't work.
If you don't feel like troubleshooting it and you want to send it over here, I'll have
a look.
So that's what's in front of me right here.
I haven't opened it yet.
I always take pictures, I'll take pictures of things.
Oh, camera is not working, camera is freaking out.
Yeah, I covered up your address, Ken.
Alright, let's have a look inside.
I've built a couple of these, I've given them some away, you see what's one he built.
Oh, this is not a single scope kit.
This is the transistor tester, I thought he built the scope kit, either way, I've done
this one as well.
How many of you seal it up like that, oh, zip lock that, okay.
And he says that when he was done with it, it was not working.
Let me see the, he said be critical, tell him if his soldering was crap, I'm looking
at it.
No, that's spot on there, Ken.
But at the bottom of the board looks good.
I don't know what this crusty white stuff is, it might just be flux residue, soldering
on the LCD looks clean, okay, from quick inspection, I don't see any obvious problems.
I didn't know this kit came where you had to solder the, he said he had to put on some
SMD parts, I don't remember, did I do SMD parts, I think I did, oh you know what this
might be, he might have the blank chip, I'm looking inside, I haven't taken the screen
off yet, but I did a HPR on these, I suppose I could put it in the show notes.
One thing is you got your zero, you zip connector in backwards, Ken, there's no way
to reach the lever, I can flip that around for you.
But now I'm wondering if this is the one where they said you, all the parts, but the chip
is not, it's an Arduino chip, it doesn't get Arduino software, but it gets other software
put on it and it is black.
So I will see if that's the issue, but possibly you got this all right and I just need the
flash chip for you.
So I'm going to pause here, take things apart a little bit, I'm going to find my other,
I have another one of these, oh wait, nope, I gave one to Asphere and I gave one to Jason,
I might not have another one of these, but anyways, I could troubleshoot it, so I'll have
a look at it and I'll report back in, okay, I've got the LCD screen off now, I'm looking
at, oh it does show to put the zip connector in in this direction, I didn't think my other
one did that, there are some different revisions of this board, so I take that back, Ken, you
got this zip connector in properly, oh I see what it was, the handle was like kind of popping
out, the handle is just a little bit wonky, but, and looking, soldering looks clean here,
you don't have to worry about your soldering, Ken, I like it's coming up through the holes
here, that means you had some proper heat going on, let me see if the transistors, that should
be a 104, the TL431, TL431, this should be a 9012, need more light, that is a 9012, this
should be a 77550, this should be a 9014, 9014, yeah, transistors are right, I'm looking quickly
at the caps, I think 2x2 is 104, everything looks clean, okay, there's the, there's the surface
pop parts you're talking about, I don't know what that is, that might be a voltage regulator,
the bigger one, it's either a little cap or a little resistor, and then some little tiny chip,
I think that's all voltage regulation, let me see where the trace is coming in, possibly not,
okay Allah, everything looks good, assuming all those components are in the right places,
I'm assuming all the resistors are, but I'll look into it deeper, I'll get a battery and do a
little testing with the multimeter, so here's one interesting thing right off the bat, if I put my
meter at the battery, I get, well this battery is a little weak, 7.8, but when I press the button to
engage the tester, I go to 1.5 and it sucks it down to 0.000, something is, shorted the ground in
here, something sucking all the power out of it, so okay, step one I guess,
okay a quick check just to make sure the battery is not junk, I, I've hooked the board up to the
power supply, putting out 9 volts at 0.5 amps, let's check it here on the multimeter,
get on the right level at DC, okay I'm checking it out and I didn't turn the output of the power
supply on, all right, let's try that first, all right, 9 volts dead on, go up to the board,
9 volts dead on, push the test button in, 8.7, so this is better, I think this battery is junk,
okay two days have gone past since I last talked about the Ken's board and you know what happens
every time I say two days have passed, right, I've ordered something from Amazon, that's what's
happened, I've wanted one of these for a while and this was kind of the impetus to actually order one,
I do do quite a bit of service mount, but more I do through hold, so analog stuff, but I get into
some digital stuff, surface mount is very tiny and what I use here on the bench is a overhead
magnifier with an LED light and it's on an armature, that doesn't give too much magnification,
I don't even know if it says on here what magnification it is,
anyways you've all seen these, they used to be like having incandescent light in like the 50s
and then there was a fluorescent version, like every desk that needs magnification has one of
these things, but that's, I use that all the time actually, however, surface mount is so incredibly small,
I've bought what I have been intending to buy for quite a while, it's in a box right here next to me,
so I suppose this HBR can be a little bit about Ken's board and a little bit about this microscope
that Ken just bought for me because I'm going to send him a bill, so let's take a look at this
and then I can look at a chip on his board, which I suspect is the problem, but it's too tiny to
see which side the dot is on, this should help, all right let's open it up, how loud was that,
that was me dropping it on the table.
First thing in instructions, I've had to set it up, I would imagine that comes mostly together,
let's see,
Styrofoam, oh this Styrofoam is very static, I'm going to touch my static mat,
this is static a word, it is no, okay so you do have to put it together a bit,
put the parts on the table here,
so what this is is a Amscope, AM SCOP, I'm assuming that's Amscope, an SE 400-7 and this is a
binocular microscope, it has a, I hope that's an LED light, that's it, it has an LED light on it,
but this will help really look at super tiny surface mount stuff,
this chip I'm trying to look at on Ken's board is tucked in between other pieces and this
little loop that I have that has an LED light on it, I can't get it close enough to this chip
because the parts around it are hiding the LED light, so it makes it, it puts it in shadow,
so I can't read what this chip is, I have a suspicion, well I looked at the schematics,
I saw the schematics and I have a suspicion what this chip is and I have a suspicion, it might
be in backwards, so we'll see if that is the case or not, all right I'll put this together,
I'm going to need a bigger bench soon, I can't fit all this, I actually built the shelf,
if anybody wants to poke through my media goblin pictures, there's one day where I'm building
a shelf underneath here, so I stuck a bunch of the stuff that was up on the desk underneath the
shelf here, like the hot air gun is under there, the case for the desoddering pen and boxes that
held parts, I just had to get some stuff off the bench, now I have to get more stuff off the bench,
unless I've been thinking about building a hutch in the back and then put the power supply,
the multimeter and the scope up on the hutch and have all the soldering stuff tucked under the
hutch maybe one day, we'll see, all right I'll put this together and I will have a look at
this little tiny surface mount, six pin dip on Ken's board, okay I just set it up and it is
more powerful than I thought, all I could see was blur, I could see my green mat like a little bit
of green, so I stuck my hand under the scope and I have to zoom out, zoom out, it's very powerful
and all of a sudden I start seeing like the pores in my skin on my hand, that's more powerful than
I thought, let me get the scope, all right, let me get the board and zoom in on it, let's see what
this chip is, it comes with some different optics too, what is this one? Wow, times 20, I'm only
using times one, what is this? Times one, the upper eyepieces, the upper eyepieces are times 10
and the lower eyepiece is times one, so and then they have times 20, that must be like,
that is super tiny, let me just put that aside, let me get the board under here,
oh this is perfect, this is a perfect size, so the board is a good 10 inches below the microscope
but I'm picking it all up, super clear, hang on while I learn how to use this,
all nice, and then you can just aim this LED light into the board, okay, so now I got that
area lit between, yeah it's the VO5, it's a VO5 chip which are, it's like a bunch of diodes in there,
I'm gonna have to look at the schematic and see which way they want this chip oriented,
orientated, oriented, you know this thing, let me look at the solder joints too,
it's a little uh, it's cool, it's gonna take a little while to get used to,
so one leg is barely on a pad, is that opened? I don't even know, I have to get one of my really
tiny screwdrivers to poke in there, one of my really tiny screwdrivers looks cute, oh no, can
this uh, the leg of this pin I'm touching with my screwdriver is too much heat and it's burned,
it's, it's trying to fall right out of the uh, okay, we may have found a problem,
the pin on this chip has been overheated and it's trying to fall right out of the case,
I'm not sure, yes, okay, this, this, first I have to replace this chip,
I have to confirm the orientation of it too, it might be still be backwards,
once I take this chip off, I'll see, I'm looking for a little dot on the board and I see the dot
on the chip, which indicates pin one, which I don't know how they expect you to see this with your
bare eye, but I can see it now, I looked up the uh, spec sheet on this, let me give you the number
of the, I'm calling it a VO5 and if you look for that, you're gonna get like shampoo or something.
Okay, the full name for the part is SBR5-04, I think it's an O4, I'll look into that if it's
something else, but that's the, it's gonna be definitely the SBR5 portion, uh, well I like this
new microscope, thanks Ken, the bill will be over soon, you can pay it in US or whatever the heck
you guys use over there, I can see you had a tough time with this surface mount is really tricky,
there is a trick to it too, if you can get solder paste which comes in a syringe and what it is
is flux with microscopic beads of solder and you, you basically take the syringe and you paint that
on each pad, then you can use a very fine tipped soldering pen just to touch each or even a better
thing is to use hot air pen and when the hot air starts heating up the pins, it'll heat up the
flux and it actually sucks it right into position on the pads and the solder melts, that's the best
way to do it hot air, but I've had success with a very fine tipped soldering pen, here's another trick
for surface mount, if you're gonna use a soldering pen, get your finest tip and put a little solder on
it and then clean it off in that little the burlopad type thing, not the sponge, that burlopad
coil up metal stuff and it'll look like you have no solder left on the tip, but actually there is
enough to do like 20 pins of a surface mount chip, so two little tips there that I've learned the
hard way or finally got around to a correct way after trying on air, this is hard, this is so close
up, it's hard to figure out what I'm looking at, there we go, looking back at this chip,
I don't know how I can possibly get a picture of this stuff, oh maybe I can use my macro lens
on my Nikon, that's not even gonna be as powerful as this microscope, but I'll see what I can do,
the other two surface mount parts, they didn't need to be oriented in either any particular way,
so, okay, did you stick this down with some type of goop first to hold it there and then solder,
there's some type of goop all underneath it, I don't blame you, I use tweezers, but
I'm gonna have to cut out a lot of pauses of this one because I am working and talking at the same time,
alright so there's uh that might be the dot on the board there, yeah they put a dot but it's kind
of a triangle and the uh the pin one is at pin three four, so I'm gonna have to find another one of
these chips and uh suck this one off and they are diodes so diodes are gonna let the DC flow in one
direction and not the other, so that could be the reason why this when you press the button on this,
this board does nothing, it's not going through these diodes, it's just hitting a wall,
if anyone wants an extended version of this podcast, there's a whole bunch of pauses and oh that's neat
because this scope is really cool, okay that's where I'm gonna start my repress, I'll see if I can
get a macro shot and if I can, wow when I come away from the microscope I've been looking at it
for like 10 minutes and now the whole entire world looks so tiny, uh if I can get a shot of this
maybe I'll have to blow it up with again or something but you will see uh what you're gonna see is
oh yeah okay there's the uh it's saying what chips should go in here on the board on the
silkscreen, SVR5-04 and if you see this picture you'll see a like a pulse width DC pulse width
something else just wadled DC pulse width pulse width on the silkscreen and then right above that
you'll see a little white triangle, I suspect that is where they want the dot the pin 1, the pin 1
on this is kitty corner, so this part I believe is backwards but it's also damaged, so let me see if
I can get one of these from like digikey or mouser or you know they're gonna cost five cents each
so I'll end up getting like 20 of them and a whole bunch of other stuff to boot, this is gonna be a
really big bill can, you better you know like put in some overtime, all right so there are the parts
from digikey, I say parts because I got three of them, they were only like a dollar each and if I
burn a leg off another one or you know I got a couple extras I'll put them into parts bin, I don't
even know what's in my parts bin anymore, there's so much stuff there, so these were a buck each and
shipping was like $4, so of course you got to pat it up a little bit so Ken bought me some nice
fluke probes there and some soldering paste, the guy's got like an endless pocket, first thing I
got to do is get rid of this microscope and I'm gonna have to suck out the bad parts, so turn on
the solder sucker and then I got to get this this blue terminal out of the way, I might take both of
them out just to free up that space, I got to get tweezers in there, there's on the bottom of the
board there are two, I forget what these even are, there are two screw terminals, one says ground,
I forget what those even are anyways, all right the top is a pulse without,
I don't know, I'd have to look it up online, uh
here, let me take a picture of this here, what's a common component?
yeah, there's the 9 volt battery terminal, let me open this up,
so there's a standard 9 volt battery terminal and there is a picture of three of these chips
in the still in the packaging, that's how tiny these get, somebody went out in this giant warehouse
with a pair of scissors and took a reel and just cut three three of these off and mailed them to me,
all right so I'll pause here, I'll suck out these the blue screw terminals, I'm gonna suck out the
bad chip and I think this is gonna take some hot air, so my hot air station is under the bench,
I'm gonna have to bring that up here and make a little room for it and get this new chip on the board,
okay I sucked the parts out, I pulled out the bad chip, I did spin it around like I mentioned,
putting pin one down on the lower right, I found that the hot air was not working so well for me
because this chip is so tiny that the air would just push it, just send it flying onto the bench,
so what I did was it's not easy to do, use your dominant hand, I'm a lefty, so I had to left my
little soldering tip, my soldering pan with the little soldering tip in my left hand and I was
holding the piece with the tweezers and if you're ever doing this just tack down one corner
of the chip, spin it around, you can align it if you want a little bit and then tack the opposite
corner, so in this case I did the the lower left pin first, spin the board around, align it on the
pads and then do the upper right and then after that just clean your tip again and you know just
do every pin, so after I did that I turned on the power and put the screen back in and I get a
light on the screen, so we're making progress here, the other thing I did was I pulled out the
the LED way back in testing, I'm going to put this back in and well I could probably do that
while you're listening, so stay tuned, let me stick it in here, I wasn't sure if the LED was in
the proper way, oh I, I have the LED in just with my thumb, I guessed on the direction, I pressed
the start button and the screen is coming up, no part, calibrate for calibration, so this chip
is, the firmware is on this chip, the problem was with this this diode array down here, this little
SMD, it is, what's it now doing, hit the key, within 25 seconds disconnect the pins after,
so it's going into the calibration, so let me solder this LED back in, let me pull the power off,
solder the LED in place, I'll put these two blue terminals back in place and can, you got your
working board, it'll be on the way back to it, I have to look around and see if I have the
proper things, to calibrate these you need just two jumper wires, there's like an A, A, B, and C pad,
so in one part of the calibration you're going to short out A, B, and C, just so it has a reference
to short, and then in another second part of the calibration you put a large capacitor in,
so I've given these capacitors to my buddy Jason and AceFear, so I don't know if I have a
capacitor that's suitable to do the calibration, but I'll look quick online and see if I have one,
and if I do, I'll do the calibration as well, and then Ken will get a nice working calibrated
board back, all right, let's try and calibrate this thing, I don't have a single capacitor,
I looked up what the calibration procedure was, and it calls for a 100 nanofarad capacitor,
but I do have resistance and capacitance substitution boxes, I don't know if I ever talked about these,
these are other kits, I have lots of kits, so if you do a little conversion it's asking for
0.1 microfarad, which I have on this capacitance substitution box, so let's try and calibrate this,
I'll thank a picture here, so next to the board you can see this
shorter piece of wire that you need to go into like A, B, C slot, or one, two, three, however they
call it, so let's turn it on, or first you got to turn on your power supply though, channel one,
nine bolts on, turn on the board, it checks the battery first, says unknown or damaged part,
but that's because we have nothing in the zip socket, not calibrated, clamp the three pins together,
so here I got to put the three pins in, I might have talked about this when I did the
the HPR on this board, so I've just shorted these three pins they want, press the button,
so you shot the three pins, now they're calling it one three and two, but anyways it's doing a self
test, then you undo the pins, ah that's what I'm doing wrong, this one might be different firmware
than mine, so this one wants, this is different than the ones I did, clamp the three probes together
like I've been saying, we can get them in there, and then press the button, it checks the battery,
and it says is this a self test, yes, so you acknowledge yes this is a self test, then it says
isolate the probes, and it checks those, I don't know if I have to acknowledge again,
CO-41-41-43 PicoFair it okay, now it's asking for
100 nano-fairs between one and three, so I'll do that with this substitution box,
it's getting a reference, tested, test is ended, all right so let me just find some parts and
we'll see if this thing works now, here is a resistor, that's just next to me,
mind both battery testing, testing the battery okay, and it says it is a 15780, let's go let me get a
transistor, no one's clean this place yet people, but we had to breathe it,
now there's a diode, I never checked a diode in this thing, let me check a diode, testing,
oh yeah, look at that, one to three, it shows the direction of the diode,
you have 241NV, let's, I don't know how to read that, not to look into that,
I'm still looking for a diode, they're around,
oh our transistor, there's one right there, in a bag of miscellaneous parts,
so with the transistor you want to put one pin in, one, one, they're kind of,
this zip socket has one, two, three, four, five, six, seven holes in it on the top and the bottom,
so you could like drop an IC in there, but that's not what they want you to do, they want you to put
one component leg over in the left, one in the right, and one in the middle, if it's a capacitor,
here's a capacitor, is that a capacitor, no, that is a mob, here's a capacitor,
they want you to put one in the left and one in the right, so let's check this electrolytic,
got every nine volts testing, it is 10.69 micro-ferred, gives you the ESR, gives voltage loss,
and it shows you the direction of the electrolytic, let's put in this transistor,
so what where I'm going now is one pin from the left is in the second hole, another pin is in
the fourth, and another pin is in the sixth, and I'll test this, all right, so this says it's a
BJT NPN transistor, it shows the, a little graphic of which is the collector, the emitter,
and the base, and it gives you other details, so this board is working now, so,
I'm sending it back to you Ken, and I was just joking about, you're going to buy me all these
extra things, I did this for fun buddy, all right, expect this back, if anybody wants to contact me
nydill at gunluckynet.net, I'm still on the mastodon thing, although it seems to be taken over by
bots and people just boosting stuff, but I'll see how it goes, until next time guys!
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