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You are here: Home / Archives for Electronics

Rowenta DG580 repair

2015/10/01 By staze

Rowenta DG580Mother-in-law, ages ago, gave me her broken Rowenta DG580 steam iron to me saying it was broken. The switch was basically doing nothing. So, I sat on the thing for months not wanting to touch an iron (boring). But, finally took a look recently. First up was the o-ring on the fill stopper. I ordered a replacement from Rowenta, but it didn’t fit at all. I also ordered a whole new cap, and it worked, but looked ugly. So I went to a local o-ring shop, and managed to find a replacement o-ring that fit pretty well. It’s a -208 silicone o-ring. It’s not a perfect fit, and a -312 might fit better, but they didn’t have any. The only difference being the thickness of the o-ring.

DG580 triggerNow, the trigger. Opening the iron required a security torx bit, then pulling off the top of the handle. The trigger, at this point, was obviously broken at the narrow point. My first attempt to fix this was simply some two part epoxy made specifically for plastics. This held for about 2 shirts worth of ironing before re-breaking. My second fix was what I should have done in the first place. I took a soldering iron on “low” (about 600F), and melted a line down the length of the narrow part of the trigger, then “mixed” the resulting plastic together then back down in the channel than had been created. Effectively “welding” the plastic back together. I then went around the periphery of the narrow part, to further weld it back to the main trigger. While not pretty at all, it does hold, and I was unable to break it with a moderate amount of force, and also pulling the trigger as hard as possible. If this fix does not work, my next step is to make a mold of the trigger with silicone rubber, then make a resin cast replacement of the trigger (I’ve also thought about 3D printing a replacement, or worse, having a metal trigger machined). Sadly Rowenta stopped making replacements some time ago.

Not sure if this will help anyone with this issue, but hopefully someone will find it useful. =)

Filed Under: Electronics Tagged With: DG580, repair, Rowenta, trigger

Global Specialties PW-2120 repair

2015/09/09 By staze

Global Specialties PW-2120I recently picked up a Global Specialties PW-2120 Sweep/Function Generator at a local electronics shop for $30. They had it in back as broken, but didn’t have the time to repair. At the time they only mentioned that the knob was broken (it was, the whole PCB had “popped” off the back of the rotary encoder. But, some prodigious application of hot glue fixed that). The bigger issue is while the buttons and everything worked, there was zero output. Changing to any frequency, sweep, or wave shape resulted in nothing on the outputs. More interestingly, the frequency counter function worked perfectly. So that wasn’t it.

Getting out the FLIR, I was able to see that the CLC522 (variable gain amp), and the 5V regulator (7805) were both getting pretty warm. More interestingly, checking the resistance between the +5v and gnd, there was only 500ohms. That’s not right (or, at least, doesn’t seem right). Visual inspection showed something a bit worrying. U1 on the main board was missing. Now, it COULD be an add-on chip, but that seems unlikely for a chip labeled “U1”.

So, first thing’s first. I contacted GlobalSpecialties to ask for schematics or a technical manual. First response I got back was the general manual, which I had already found. So, emailed them back, and the next day received a nice zip file of all the schematics! Awesome!

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Electronics Tagged With: Global Specialties, PW-2120, repair

CircuitMaker

2015/07/06 By staze

CircuitMakerNever being terribly happy with Eagle (I didn’t grow up on it, and really only used it because it was free, and ran on the Mac (unlike KiCad), the idea of CircuitMaker seemed great. Those that use Altium seem to love it, but it costs an arm and a leg. CircuitMaker promised to be free, and offer a lot of the features of Altium. Sadly, it seems it misses one mark in that it’s PC only (though it’s easy enough to run in VMWare). There does seem to be a huge interest from the community on a Mac version, however (a fair number of threads, and responses to threads asking for it).

Using the tool seems quite similar to pretty much any EDA software (good), and it imports Eagle files (great). I don’t work on much in the way of confidential stuff, so the fact stuff is open to the public is fine by me. I just imported my two Eagle projects (relating to a GPSDO, and a Rubidium Oscillator), and the GPSDO has been forked so far.

At this point, I can’t say much more about the product other than I like where it’s going. I would like some way to work offline, like on flights, etc. They could probably allow a “checkout” for a project, then limit the amount of time you work on it before checking back in. I guess the biggest issue with that is it would make collaboration very difficult, if that’s the direction they want to really head with it (multiple hobbyists working on the same design).

Anyway, at this point, I’d give it a solid 4/5, with a point knocked off for being Windows only. Once they get a Mac version out the door, I’ll give it that last point. Right now, though, I’m going to try out Upverter, and maybe a more recent build of Kicad (they seem to have official builds for Mac now).

Chris Gammell (“The Amp Hour”, and “Contextual Electronics”) did a review a bit ago comparing Kicad, CircuitMaker, and Upverter. If you are familiar with Chris, you may know the results before reading ((I kid, of course. While he does certainly prefer KiCad, he does seem to give the others a fair shake, and admits most design work is done with a net connection, so offline work isn’t really THAT big a deal)). =P

Filed Under: Electronics Tagged With: Altium, Chris Gammell, CircuitMaker, KiCad, Upverter

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