Repaired my Laptop's Power System Today

Hey Everyone,

There's nothing worse than a computer failure especially if the computer itself is fine but you can't recharge it and turn the thing on.

Recently my laptop stopped accepting energy from the power supply; lasted a good year and a half before this. It took a lot of fiddling to get the recharge light to turn on so I could use it but after a little while even that stopped working, I tried to De-oxidize the connection surface by cleaning it with some alcohol but even then it still didn't work.

When I was younger I had a tendency to take things apart; I was very curious of how things worked, sadly at that time of my life I had a habit of not putting things back together but thankfully I've learned better since then.

I decided that it was time to repair my laptop once and for all; by completely replacing the power connection inside, I had some spare electronics that was no longer of use that had a power socket which was compatible with a plug I had lying about so I De-soldered it from the board. It took a while to open up my laptop; finding all the hidden screws and storing them away safe so I could put everything back together eventually: I had actually opened my laptop a few times before this out of curiosity so I got pretty good at opening it this time. Once I had opened the laptop I unscrewed the power board and detached it, I aligned the new power socket up for comparison and it looked like it would fit inside perfectly so I began work on the power system. I detached the old socket and aligned the new one up, soldered it on and made sure everything looked ok.

Here you can see the new socket attached and the old one on the right:

After the new socket was successfully attached I discovered that one of the surface mounted components had disintegrated into powder under the heat of the soldering iron, it was just too close to the socket. I needed to know what I destroyed so I could repair it, I performed a continuity test and one side connected to positive and the other to ground which indicated to me that I had destroyed a small capacitor used for smoothing out the power coming in. I got out one of my 0.01uf micro farad capacitors albeit much larger than a tiny surface mounted one and attached it on the other side which had much easier to access connections that the ones the original component was using.

Here you can see the new capacitor attached and ready to go:

Once everything was soldered I double checked everything and placed the board back inside the laptop making sure to attach all the wires. I aligned it up and began to screw it back in place and thankfully it fit like a glove, here you can see it back where it belongs:

I hooked up the power supply to my new plug, it's one of those power supplies that support multiple connectors that attached to the end so I had to adapt my connection to it. I made absolutely sure that it would not break for a long time by layering heat shrink as these kinds of connectors have a tendency to break and bend otherwise. Here you can see what I came up with:

It worked! The charging light is lit and I have power again:

Sure beats the thought of buying a whole new laptop.

Thanks for reading,

Ashton.

Dodgy Vergola Motor

Hey Everyone,

My family got a vergola built to cover our deck out the back, it came with a remote controlled 12v motor which after about half a year or so it began to stuff up and could no longer open the cover. Since I'm quite handy around the house I decided to have a go at repairing the motor to save on spending ridiculous amounts of money to get it replaced. I opened it up and it was full of rust water so I took everything out, cleaned it all up and screwed it all back together. It seemed to work again so I applied a skin of silicone around all the outside of the case to prevent any further water making its way in. It worked well for a month or so but ended up breaking again, I took it apart to see what had happened and the silicone did the job of keeping out the water so I knew it had to be a flaw in the design. I allowed the gears to function while the case was open so I could see what was going on, the arm was attached to a worm gear that allowed the small 12v motor to apply enough torque to open an entire vergola with a small gear box to slow the ratio down. In the back of my mind I kind of knew what must have been happening so I applied the idea in practice; I thought about the worm gear pulling the arm as far back as possible while I examined the structure of the plastic, something just wasn't right to me. I allowed it to pull back and the moment it touched the plastic that stopped it, it would jam which I had imagined was happening in my mind. Since I had a dremel handy I got myself a thickish metallic washer to act as a more solid buffer and cut a section out of it for the worm gear shaft to fit, I placed it up against the end with superglue to prevent the worm gear from pressing the arm too close to the plastic and allow a small air gap, I put everything back together and added a new skin of silicone to make it water proof which I'm still shaking my head about since it's designed to work outdoors and at that kind of price? these companies that skimp on waterproofing disgust me to be honest; nothing that's made these days have any quality and the only real way to obtain quality is to either make your own or fix what you already have, it's just disgraceful. To this very day it has worked without a hitch thanks to the simple modification I made and my family can now enjoy the sunlight on the deck without wasting a single buck.

Thanks for reading,
Ashton.

Quickfix - Arduino Pro Mini's not Syncronizing

Hey everyone,

A little while back I bought an Arduino Pro Mini (5v version) and was planning on using it to make small devices like remotes or human interface devices to control my computer. Everything was going well, I soldered connections to all the pins and was ready to program the device using a USB to Serial converter (which is also rated at 5v to match my Arduino) that you can see here:

So I plugged it in and everything seemed fine, but as soon as I tried to reprogram the Arduino from the default blink project that it came pre-programmed with, I received an error saying that I couldn't synchronise with the board and that Processing couldn't upload my new code. I spent a good day looking up solutions on the internet and nothing helped, there was even two images of the same serial board I had attached to the Arduino forwards and backwards which wouldn't help anyone who was looking for solutions and I was sure I had the boards matching up correctly so that wasn't it, you'll find there's two version with the BLK to GRN switched so just make sure that your particular version is aligned correctly to the serial converter. Eventually I found my own solution utilising a method I use when debugging in C++ / C#; I connected up just the power and ground then slowly introduced each pin until I was able to commit my code to the Arduino. The solution was simply to remove one of the pins that said ground (Since the BLK pin was also a ground pin) on the Arduino Mini Pro which was connecting to a pin called CTS on the Serial board as you can see here:

As soon as I removed the pin everything just worked, no more sync issues with Processing and I could finally begin developing with the Arduino board :)

I recommend that you try connecting wires first before removing the pin; just in case your mini has a different reason than mine for not syncing, if yours doesn't have the same problem then it would be safer since the small board doesn't cope well with repeated application of heat from a soldering iron.

After solving the problem I read up on what the pin does, it's called CTS (Clear To Send) and was responsible for serial handshaking. Since the pin is omitted from the Arduino Mini Pro, I'm guessing they no longer need that pin and was used with older systems that didn't come with a self reset feature for programming; older Arduino's required you to reset the board just before the serial command to reprogram the board was sent. The USB to Serial Converter must have kept it for backwards compatibility with older boards and other serial devices. For additional information for those who are curious you can read about the flow control system here.

My Arduino Mini Pro seems to have the connections reversed from the one specified on the Arduino website here which may indicate that my Arduino may be outdated or perhaps it's a difference between the 3.3v and 5v versions. This being the case, if your version has the connections similar to the website then I can't guarantee if this solution will fix yours since I've never used that version but if my theory about the CTS pin being pulled to ground is correct which causes interference with the re-programming then I do hope this solution helps you too.

Thanks for reading,
Ashton.