How is Pixels doing?

If you're referring to the little illuminated dots on my monitor, they're pretty good.

If you're referring to the small furry cat that runs my life, she's doing fine as well.
She just got me out of bed to be fed, sneered at the food I gave her, and left the
house. This is normal. She merely wants the assurance that I have done my job.

Most of the rest of the time I am allowed to sit down and have her sit on me, so
that's OK

pca

There seems to be a common thread here, ie people plugging the display board in
incorrectly.

Brian, any chance of putting, on your page, a huge supergigantic blinking message with three layers of javascript messagebox confirmations saying "you must plug the display board back in correctly or you will blow the internal fuses and ruin the display board"?

Brian, any chance of putting, on your page, a huge supergigantic blinking message with three layers of javascript messagebox
confirmations saying "you must plug the display board back in correctly or you will blow the internal fuses and ruin the display
board"?

Perhaps including a spare fuse in the LED kit would be an idea too?

Works fine now with the fuse replaced (thanks Hugo, pca).

The odd thing was, I did check for proper alignment, but probably muffed it because I had left the hard drive connected, and the drive cable obscures the view just enough..

Now for some dimming capability..

-ml

grrr... i want my buttons!! =] The suspense is killing me.

I have a semi-large message about it, but I guess I'll have to increase it.

Mostly it just needs to emphasize the left-right alignment, noting that the connector has more holes than there are pins on the mainboard.

I fussed hard with the front-to-back alignment (the usual error with most things), and didn't notice the lower pin count on the mainboard, since they were partially obscured by the HDD cable.

Oh well, no harm done, and I know about it now. Silly me.

Cheers

Err... both the connector and the header are 20-way! There are no extra holes. IDC connectors just happen to overhang somewhat on each side, and can be fitted offset by virtue of one pair of pins sliding up the side of the connector.

Rob

Just wanted to post an update, got my fuses today, and replaced the blown one on the connector board... Whalla... everything works great again, thanks for the pointers and helpful hints guys..

so lopan u going for round 2 or are you just ging to have mark the lord do it for you?

I thought about it, I shake way too much, for 50 bucks I can have mark do it and not worry about killing anything. So I think I'll put down the iron and let someone who knows what their doing take over.

ya, might as well.. thought mark did the exact same thing to his player that you did circuty just seems to hard to fry to me.. maybe im just a teen who thinks hes invicible, who knows..

Well there ya go.

But now I know and can avoid the most common error, and I still have the trouble-shooting skills to counter most anything else that could go wrong. The $50 is not exactly a profit margin of any kind for me, just enough to keep the mailbox from getting overly crammed with packages.

Cheers

After getting the run around from UPS about customs issues, I went home and performed the hack myself... for the most part it works I got it all soldered up and realized that I'd soldered both top and bottom LED's wrong and damaged one of the solder points on the top... I did get it to light up, however I can't adjust the dimness now.... So basically three of my buttons work the way they should and the top one just stays really bright all the time. I need to stay away from the soldering iron from now on.

Yeah. For future reference, Priority Post generally out-performs UPS when shipping to/within Canada (as does just about any service other than UPS).

Cheers

I've been playing with my portasol and an old GFX card tonight. It seems that hot air reflow is the way to go with this iron.
I managed to cleanly de- and re-solder several of these resistor networks on a board that is denser than the display panel. Two of these networks are literally within their own width's distance of a plastic connector, and the connector came away virtually unscathed after 4 passes of the iron. I don't have any qualms about taking this method to my display board. If there'd been a 561 network on the GFX card I'd have snarfed it and done it today, but I wasn't so lucky.

My only question is whether the solder already on the pads is going to be enough to reflow, or whether I'm going to have to stick some paste on..., oh and trying to decide whether to get blue or red buttons.

Does anyone know how well the red buttons match to 98-02 VW intrument panel's red?

Is it still possible to get the light kits? I sent Brian email a couple of weeks ago but I've not heard anything.

Same here... and im itching to get my empeg to look like the pic tony took with the neon red faceplate.

-Greg

I have not replied because I only email as kits become available. I should start getting them out faster after this weekend.

Are the button kits still going strong? Not heard from anyone who has received them recently. I ordered mine ~3 weeks ago - I'm not bugging you or in a hurry for the kits, just want to make sure they're still in production!

Cheers,

A.

They are still comming. Unfortunatly one of my molds expired and it takes a couple of days to make a new one.

That's great. Is there anything else we can do - I for one would be willing to pre-pay for them if the cost of this new mould is going to temporarily put you out of pocket at all.

A.

I was wondering how fast you get those out because I have requested a set of buttons and knobs back in april or may. Thanks