[Noisebridge-discuss] how does one debug an lcd screen?

Wed May 4 18:13:23 UTC 2011

Hey, congrats!

Really nice to meet you on Monday.  

Please feel welcome to come back whenever you like.

Mitch.

Date: Wed, 4 May 2011 00:18:02 -0700
From: mike at mindmech.com
To: rbelknap at gmail.com
CC: noisebridge-discuss at lists.noisebridge.net
Subject: Re: [Noisebridge-discuss] how does one debug an lcd screen?

Hey thanks again to everyone who helped me
out on Monday. I replaced 3 bust-ass capacitors
with some scavenged from a motherboard, and
everything works now!

I even have a few screws left over from taking
apart the monitor! Definitely alot easier than I thought
it would be.

 mike

On Sun, May 1, 2011 at 11:14 AM, Mike Schachter <mike at mindmech.com> wrote:

Thanks everyone! I'll bring it in Monday then, any help
towards figuring out what's wrong would be great!

  mike

On Sun, May 1, 2011 at 1:34 AM, Robert Belknap <rbelknap at gmail.com> wrote:

Oooh, count me in on that vacation thing!

Having recently done a monitor repair myself, (though I'm even less of an expert than Zach...) what you're describing sounds like 1 or more bad capacitors.  Looking at the third picture, I'd say that the cap on the top right looks damaged. It's had to tell from the angle, but the bottom 2 on the right in that same photo might need to go as well.  (They won't necessarily look all exploded if they've failed.  If you see any kind of bulging, that's a sign that the capacitor needs to be replaced.)

Oh yeah, and the CapXOn brand is the same as what I had to replace in my ViewSonic.  If you want to make sure, (and want the soldering practice ;-) (parenthetical smilies look weird) ) you could go ahead and replace them all.  I sourced replacements for all but the big 400v one on my board from mouser, and they ran me less than $10, iirc. (The big cap was expensive, and mine looked okay - so I left it.)

Looks like the board has lots of room to work on, and your parts don't look as covered in foam as mine were. :-)
-Robert

On Sat, Apr 30, 2011 at 19:33, Zach . <organic_unity at yahoo.com> wrote:

vaction? where?  I wanna go :)

thanks for the introduction brian.  Ive fixed a few LCDs at NB and while Im definitely not an expert at it I feel like I do have the hang of it and could probably point you in the right direction.  For starters, the cap in the far bottom left looks bad.  

Bring it by on Monday and I can probably take a look at it.  I might even be over there tonight.  I don't offer free repairs but I like to teach and impart what I've learned.  So if you want to learn how to fix I'd be glad to help.
best,
zach

--- On Sun, 5/1/11, Brian Morris <cymraegish at gmail.com> wrote:

From: Brian Morris <cymraegish at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Noisebridge-discuss] how does one debug an lcd screen?
To: noisebridge-discuss at lists.noisebridge.net
Date: Sunday, May 1, 2011, 1:11 AM

Zach is the monitor wizard who fixed a bunch of them recently.
I think he is away on vacation, but you could ask him for help.

Brian

On Sat, Apr 30, 2011 at 2:49 PM, Mike Schachter <mike at mindmech.com> wrote:

I'm working under the assumption that the power supply
is busted, so I took the thing apart and pulled out the
board where the power plug goes. This is what it looks
like:

http://imgur.com/a/pbpea#2spwh

I'm not quite sure how to proceed. There's a bunch of
capacitors everywhere. To my inexperienced eye, nothing
looks all that exploded... Should I just take a voltmeter
and measure the resistance of each end of the capacitors?

If one of the capacitors was messed up, would the resistance
be infinite? I'm kind of at a loss because none of this involves
probability distributions, calculus or computing derivatives. The
board doesn't have any equations on it!?! Maybe I could bring
it into circuit hacking Monday?

 mike

On Fri, Apr 29, 2011 at 8:53 PM, Mike Schachter <mike at mindmech.com> wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> So, I'm not the most knowledgeable person on earth when
> it comes to electronics... I took an electronics class once,
> and passed it...
>
> I have an LCD screen, a Westinghouse. Kind of like a TV
> or something. From years ago. It failed on me - it sorta
> powers on, but nothing shows up on the monitor.
>
> Sometimes the ON light just flashes, gradually fading softly
> into the quiet night. It makes me kind of sad. Sometimes I
> wonder if I can bury it in an LCD screen cemetery; would it
> come back to life, only to eviscerate it's hapless owner? My
> final screams should rightfully go unanswered, having toyed
> with things that unknowing humans should not. I'd like to
> avoid that. At least for now.
>
> So... does anyone know how to debug problems with LCD screens?
>
>  mike
>
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