Tag Archives: Repair

Repair

Cuckoo CRP-N0681F Battery Replacement

The Cuckoo CRP-N0681F rice cooker doesn’t run Doom (yet; see below), but it can talk, sing and chuff like a steam locomotive. It also prepares all kinds of rice. One day, the display went blank. The next time I plugged it back in, it greeted me in Korean and wanted me to set the clock. It seemed that the internal battery had died and the user manual agreed with that:

About Lithium battery
– This product contains lithium battery for improving blackout
compensation and time. Lithium battery lasts 3 years.
– When current time is not displayed on the screen, it means the battery is exhausted. It should be replaced.

Unfortunately, that’s all what the manual had to say about this topic. A quick search on the internet didn’t reveal any clues about the battery replacement, so I opened it up to have a look inside.

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Sega Saturn (PAL VA3) Modifications

This is a follow-up to the modifications I did to a NTSC VA15 Saturn. In this article, I will implement the following Sega Saturn (PAL VA3) modifications: Region-free BIOS, FRAM, and a 50/60 Hz switch (SW4).

After finishing the last article, I took three broken PAL Saturns that I had lying around apart to see what I could repair and modify next: A Model 1 with VA1 mainboard, a Model 1 with VA3 (aka “PAL VA SD”) mainboard and an almost identical Model 2 (VA5, also “PAL VA SD”). I had only one working Type-B power supply, so I had to make a choice. I went with the VA3 Model 1 because the mainboard was in the best condition and only needed a working disc drive and power cable, reset button stick, power suppy and some cleaning. This is how is looked before:

Sega Saturn Model 1
Sega Saturn Model 1
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Sega Saturn Modifications

This article is about implementing the following Sega Saturn modifications: Region-free BIOS, FRAM, and switchless 50/60 Hz.

But first, we’ll need to go back in time a decade or so. Back then, I was modifying my “This is COOL” skeleton SegaSaturn (HST-0021/HST-3220) like crazy, stuffing everything inside that I could find:

"This is COOL" skeleton SegaSaturn
“This is COOL” skeleton SegaSaturn
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Philips CDI350 Repair Part 3

It’s been a while since I opened my first Philips CDI350 portable CD-i player and published a repair guide with capacitor list. I have already received some positive feedback that this was helpful for others fixing their players. However, part 2 of the article ended with a big question mark because some topics remained unsolved. Let’s have a look at the status of these topics and see if I can resolve them today in Philips CDI350 Repair Part 3.

1. S-Video output is not working

This turned out to be my fault. After carefully following the traces to and from the video encoder and comparing every component with the service manual, I noticed that I had soldered two electrolytic capacitors with the wrong polarity: C938 and C991. I can only assume that this happened because I used the + marks as indicators and not the white dots. Just look at the vast amount of plusses:

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Puhui T-962 IR Reflow Oven Modifications

The Puhui T-962 is a cheap IR reflow oven that has been around for many years (the earliest occurrence that I’ve found is from 2007). It has some serious and not so serious flaws that many blogs have already addressed. Known modifications include: Proper grounding, replacing the insulation tape, custom firmware and additional temperature sensors. Some people go even further and replace the system fan and controller board, add more powerful infrared heating elements or an additional fan for better heat distribution. I have included links to all of these modifications at the end of the article.

I bought the T-962 last November to have some support when soldering SMD components. But before I could use it for the first time, I had to take care of the most critical flaws.

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Philips CDI470 Diagnosis and Repair

For upcoming experiments, I was in need of a working CD-i player with a Mono IV mainboard and 8 KB of NVRAM. I checked my basement and found a broken CDI470/20 that had been sitting there for years. Previous repair attempts had failed and I hadn’t bothered to look at it since.

Upon the first start, it greeted me with the memory full error:

CD-i memory full error
CD-i memory full error
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NEC PC-FX Mouse (FX-MOU) Repair

When taking new screenshots for my old PC-FX articles, I noticed that my PC-FX mouse (FX-MOU) didn’t work properly anymore. It still detected the movement fine, but if failed to register one of the mouse buttons. My spare mouse turned out to suffer from this too.

It’s time for a quick repair. Two screws underneath the label hold the mouse together (marked with yellow circles).

NEC PC-FX Mouse (FX-MOU)
NEC PC-FX Mouse (FX-MOU)
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Formac ProFormance 3 Plus Fan

This is a quick fix for my Apple Power Macintosh 7500/100. It doesn’t have its own article yet and has only been mentioned a couple of times. This article also isn’t about the Power Macintosh itself, but about the graphics accelerator that the previous owner had built in. The Formac ProFormance 3 Plus was advertised as “The Fastest Graphics Accelerator for your Mac” in 1999. This is the best version of ProFormance 3 with 300 MHz pixel frequency and 32 MB SGRAM (PNGA94-5).

Formac ProFormance 3 Plus 32MB
Formac ProFormance 3 Plus 32MB
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Philips CDI605T Disassembly and Repair

My Philips CDI605T/20 needed repairs before I can fully use it. Some of them was mandatory for operation (Timekeeper), some of them to make it easier on the ears (fan, optical disc drive tray). I already had experience with a Mini MMC chassis on the very similar consumer player CDI220/00 and knew what awaited me inside (its service manual helped a bit). It is actually possible to perform these repairs without taking the entire case apart (see shortcuts). I took special precautions and made photos of each and every step to be able to put everything back together in the end.

I began with removing the case and the bezels of the extension cards on the rear. Make sure to slide out the lower card first, otherwise its metal plate will grind on the solder side of the upper card.

Philips CDI605T extension cards 22ER9132 (Ethernet, SCSI, 4 MB RAM) and 22ER9424 (DVC R2.1, 1 MB RAM)
Philips CDI605T extension cards 22ER9132 (Ethernet, SCSI, 4 MB RAM) and 22ER9424 (DVC R2.1, 1 MB RAM)
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NEO Power PC-E 128M+SAVE Flash Cart Repair

The PC Engine flash cart by Neo Team was first released in 2006, ten years before the Turbo EverDrive was born. In 2009, they added a save feature and released it as the new version V1.1 or ‘128+SAVE’. There is no unique name of this cart because there were usually expressions like ‘power’, ‘super’ or ‘ultra’ added to the name. I bought this cart in 2011 but didn’t use it very often. It just wasn’t as compatible as it claimed to be. With the advent of 64-bit Windows 8, driver troubles limited the usability even further. And I never got the save feature to work. The whole package was sitting on my shelf until last year when I took it out again to compare it with the Super SD System 3.

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