On no account should you grope for this particular nipple.

And please refrain from tweaking it - it may break off .

The basic hack for button illumination is now in Hijack v202.

Support for some form of variable dimming will follow after I get/install the physical button hack from Brian.

Cheers

no pressure to get Mr. Lord a kit of course...

:=)

Just curious as to if anyone has tried installing the kit yet? I got the knob board and components... But still scared to actually do it!

Did you look in the Reviews section of this BBS?

Just how many hard orders for buttons do you have? If there are enough, then this might be the place to have a short run made.

http://www.protomold.com/prices/prices.asp

Urk! I did the math. I think there would need to be 5-600 orders to make the cost come in.

I wasn't even aware that these were shipping yet (except for Tony's).

Is there any progress on a more opaque button and knob color yet? I am even more anxious to give it a shot after Tony's writeup since I am a pretty good solderer. My first job many years ago consisted of me sitting there soldering and desoldering all day, and Tony's warning of the difficulty sounds like a personal challenge to me and only makes me want to do it more. But I want to wait to see if Brian can improve the light dispersion through those buttons a little bit more first.

One thing I am curious about is how do you mold the buttons?

I've still been trying some diffusion techniques, and working on other colors. I have only shipped out three kits with preliminary buttons. I hope to finalize the process this weekend and start contacting people. But this all depends on a new interest I have and how much time that takes up.

I've made a silicon mold from the originals and then use a pourable plastic. I took me about three molds and twenty or so tries until I got them to come out 99% perfect.

Which pourable plastic? I'm using Smooth-On Oomo 30 for my silicone mold, then task 10 pourable plastic. The mold turned out nice, but I can't for the life of me get the bubbles that form in the plastic out. The guy at smooth-on said I needed to bake the moisture out of my mold and I tried that, it helped but I'm still getting tiny bubbles forming in my plastic? Maybe I need to bake it longer?

Brian, I tried the hack on my Empeg and failed miserably, now the player is acting 10 kinds of funky! Not to worry I ordered another 10gig player (been wanting to for a while, to have a backup). Ever considered letting people send you their VFD's? In my case I'd wanna send you a funky VFD to see if you could
A. Make it work properly again
B. Make it glow!
Either way I've got nothing to lose!

OMG, don't post stuff like that. When you kill an empeg it's a sad sad thing. Kind of like clubbing a baby seal.

Calvin

I'd be interested in different button colors. I don't have the skills to install the light kit, but I would definitely put in better buttons in a split second.

I'd like to have a very dark black color please.

Calvin

have you ever tasted baby seal? mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

Yes, It's yummy, except I hate the way the fur sticks to your teeth....

Just heard from tech support, they said they could definately fix my player. So thats cool, but I was still bummed that I couldn't do the fix, then I remembered a place my company uses to get replacement batteries for their Ipaq's, these guys will take a 32meg PPC and solder new ram chips to the board up to 256meg! Anyway I remember them seeming to be a small shop and pretty cool people in general that do quality work. I sent them an email asking them if they would like to take the project on and am anxiously waiting for their reply. I told them if they could do this as a service they might have quite a few people willing to give them their business. I'm wondering how many people here would want to send their units in to these guys if it turns out their willing to take it on?

Guess it would depend on how much they would charge to do it and where they are located. Keep us informed if they are willing.

Well my first choice is sending it to Brian if he'll do it. I'd rather he got my money since he came up with this hack, and I'd trust the guy who originally hacked up his own Empeg to do mine... But, if he can't do it for some reason, I'd consider sending it to someone with *serious* electronics skills, as long as someone else reviews them favorably... I'm not going to be a guinnea pig... It'd be different if I bought my Empeg for $199 like a lot of people around here, but mine were $1599 and $699, so I'm not trusting them to just anyone.

Let us know how it works out, though.

Definately if Brian wanted to do it, I would prefer that too! But I think A. He's really really busy right now, and B. He might not want to take on that liability, so just trying to open up some alternatives.

I hear ya, and, like I said, this is a good Plan B. I heard there was a chance Brian might go to the West Coast meet and do some modding. That's definitely the ticket for me right now until I hear that's not an option.

Speaking of which, my kit arrived today, thanks.

My.. those components are tiny, much smaller than the photos seen so far would suggest. But no worse than other stuff I have worked with in the past. I'll post some pics of my own later.

I've also updated my toolkit with a nifty "Kester No-Clean SMT Repair Kit", which has some LMT solder, a flux-pen, tip-tinner, a roll of desolder-braid, and a cutesy suction gadget that's intended to be used in place of tweezers. Price was about the same as (or slightly less) flux-pen + solder + tinner purchased separately.

I've also got precision tweezers, a magnifier-gator-clamp thingie, a suction device for desoldering, and some micro-tips for my irons.

Perhaps I'll have a go at it on the weekend. If all goes well, I might even offer to provide installation for others in the Great White North.

Cheers

Well, bad news here.

I installed the kit, worked first try, looks nice.

But.. my display is misbehaving. It's very dim, and the
standby LED stays on when the display is on, and the IR
receptor ignores my remotes.

Oh well, win some, lose some. I'll figure it out eventually.

Cheers

-ml

That sounds exactly like the symptoms I'm having. Sorry to hear it.... I'd hoped I'd be the only one. On the plus side David Moss says worst case scenario is replacing the VFD board. But that plus the cost of shipping could be well over 170 bucks! Then again, I'm just the average user, I'm sure the Empeg guys will give you the programming god discount.

> That sounds exactly like the symptoms I'm having.

Ok, um, that is bad. What are the odds that two of the first three people to try and install this (besides Brian himself of course) would make the exact same mistake and blow the same thing? Maybe we should pool some money together and get David or Hugo one so they can take a look at it and see if there are any unforseen issues with the design?

>That sounds exactly like the symptoms I'm having.

Let's explore this a bit further. Do you really mean exactly the same? Please describe, from scratch, if you would. With enough information (and perhaps a few hints from David), we can figure this out.


>I'm sure the Empeg guys will give you .. discount.

Err.. dunno. Sometimes I suspect I'm viewed as more of an annoyance to them. But I'd really rather just get some information about voltages and test-points, so I can diagnose and fix it here.

Speaking of which.. Brian? The +5V connection point for the knob.. what voltage do you read from there? I only see 4V on that pin.

Thanks

Well the symptoms are

dim display

no remote

sometimes after the "loading visuals" part of bootup my display shuts down and if I open hyperterm and hit enter a few times it comes back up.

and my standby LED also stays on.

Thats all I can think of, and I'm also getting 4v from that pin.

I spoke to David Moss at Empeg about it this was his reply....

It sounds like you may have damaged the power supply circuit on the display
board, although you might just have done something bad to the dimmer
circuit. I think we can probably repair it, so sending the player back would be best.

Brett

Cool. So it's probably not my ribbon cable, then. The cable on my unit was badly pinched during factory assembly, and felt like it might be just hanging on by a thread. I did check it for continuity, though, and it seems okay, but I worried that might be just luck of positioning (bending).

But the symptoms you describe exactly match those seen here, so I'm inclined to assume the cable is working. One less variable to wonder about.

I'm wondering if maybe soldering that +5V (+4V?) pin might have leaked and shorted a trace on the underside or something. Nothing else in the hack is mechanically close enough to anything to worry about.

Let's see if David can send any hints (I emailed him) for what to measure. If not, I may have to break the seals on my other unit to compare signals/levels between the two.

Cheers

Well, thats the difference here, I abandoned the project before even getting the LED's in the buttons (I'd ordered the wrong LED's) so I didn't even get to solder the knob button to anything. Just that tiny little resistor. I removed it and here I am.

I am now unclear about what you actually did. Did you actually install the knob mod, or just that single resistor (4-pack)?

-ml