Tuesday, July 2, 2013

Back From the Dead

Wow, the TS1000 almost went into the trash can tonight. After trying to repair the keyboard ribbon cable, I plugged it back in to test my work. Unfortunately, nothing happened. I couldn't get the TS1000 to do anything at all for about 20 minutes. I thought I had killed it for sure. As it turns out, the loose end of that poorly soldered ground strap was making a connection with another component and grounding out the TS1000. Repositioning the ground strap and applying some pressure caused it to spring back to life!

Back to the keyboard... I cut the ribbon connector back slightly to undamaged traces and cut back the the surrounding plastic to fit into the circuit board connectors.

The biggest challenge was getting the old broken bits of ribbon cable out of the circuit board connector. I kept trying to insert one of the ribbon cables into the connector but there were still some tiny plastic pieces in there blocking it. I used a thin blade to get the final bits out. I ran a test and everything but keys Q-T worked! Some continuity testing showed that the ribbon cable was not making contact on pin #2 of the connector. I had bent one of the pins slightly trying get the plastic bits out so that it was no longer making contact with the ribbon cable. I used a sewing needle to bend the pin back into place and... All the keys work! I will be adding some clear packing tape to the ribbon cable to re-enforce it for the future.

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