Tag: wanton destruction of purchased goods

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Pieces

My TV is in pieces and I still can’t get at the god damn control board. From the pictures I’ve seen of the other similar models, it’s like this thing is purposefully designed to be impossible to get at. I would pretty much have to remove every single damn panel, cable, plug and screw to get the chassis out. And even then, getting the chassis open to get at the board would be no picnic.

After reading more forums, it seems like this might be even deeper than the four big capacitors, there’s stories of
every single capacitor going bad on this line.

I think I’m going to just put it back together and call Mitsubishi and give them hell like I’ve never given hell before. This TV is only three years old, barely out of warranty (which I probably voided when I opened up the back anyway). TVs should last more than three years. We didn’t even watch it that much.

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Victory!

It works! I updated the Flickr gallery with some shots of it working.

The right arrow’s wire is a bit loose, when I first screwed everything in to the enclosure, it wasn’t working, but taking it back out and putting it back in fixed it. I hope it doesn’t spontaneously stop working after time.

I made such a mess on the kitchen table for this project…

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After one evening…

photo.jpg

So my progress so far:

– “Liberated” the control box from the remainder of the soft pad, rendering the soft part useless.
– Used a recently purchased Dremel to drill into the top of the control box, making room for the output port, select button and start button.
– Hot glued the port and buttons into place (although one of the buttons doesn’t really want to stay, I made the hole a bit too big.
– Soldered most of the wires I need to the control board. The guide I was going by was for a third party Mad Catz DDR pad, which had nice, easy to connect to solder points with posts and all. The actual Konami version is harder, as there are very tiny holes and no posts, so I had to strip down the wires down to half of their threads, slip them through the holes and solder them to the flat part of the board.
– Verified the connections of the wires to various parts on the control board with continuity tester.

Next up is soldering up the last two wires (select and start) to be used for the switches, then soldering the other half of all the wires to the port and switches. I’m still a bit unsure about the stability of the wires, they are awfully fragile now that only half of them are used. I’m going to use electrical tape to tape them to the board after they all are soldered in, hopefully that will keep them from shifting too much and snapping off.

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My next project

So I don’t remember if I posted or not about it, but I bought the updated control box for my Cobalt Flux hard DDR pad and was disappointed to find that the XBox connectivity was only for the original XBox, not the XBox 360. I did some research online, and it turns out that many people are disappointed about this, and that a solution exists, it just involves a bit of breaking apart a cheaper dance mat and solder and perhaps a resistor or two. I just ordered a bundle that has an XBox 360 mat in it, and it’ll be a sacrifice for the greater good.

Now I need to find my soldering iron…