For a while I’ve wanted to use my BA as a universal remote, but the IR emitter was just too weak to be useful. A few days ago I successfully modded my BA and now I can control my TV from 8m away. I decided to post my experiences in case anyone else wants to do the mod.
I had heard the on some HP iPAQs, people have managed to replace a single resistor and got a huge increase in range so I decided to open up my BA and see if there was any resistor that was limiting current to the IR emitter. However, after looking through the datasheet for the BA's IR transceiver module (Agilent HSDL-3201), it became obvious that it was just not designed for consumer IR and I would have to replace it with a transceiver that was designed for consumer IR.
I started looking on the internet for a suitable replacement and after some searching I decided to buy two of these:
http://uk.farnell.com/jsp/search/productdetail.jsp?SKU=1469607
Unfortunately this transceiver is not pin compatible with the existing one in the BA (none of the ones I looked at were), so I decided I would have to glue it on upside down and solder wires to it.
The replacement transceivers arrived a few days ago and I started the mod. After I opened up my BA and removed the backup battery, I started taking out the existing IR transceiver using a soldering iron and pliers. I was a bit too rough and ended up pulling up one of the pads on the PCB. Luckily the pad was the only one not connected to anything.
After I had removed the old IR transceiver, I soldered wires to the pads on the PCB. I then glued the new IR transceiver onto the PCB, upside down, and soldered the wires onto the transceiver.
Here is a wiring diagram showing the IR transceiver positioned upside down on the PCB, with pins facing upwards.
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After I had reassembled my blue angel, I ran the novii remote software and tested it. Success! The software successfully learned all the commands from my original TV remote, and I was able to control my TV from the very back of my living room. I even went into the garden to test it, and I was still able to control my TV up to 8 metres away. The original TV remote control can control the TV from 10 metres away, but I’m not complaining.
I don’t use IrDA, but I tested it anyway to see if it still worked and it did. I was able to send a contact card from my BA to my old nokia phone 1.6m away and I was able to receive a contact card from the nokia phone 1.3m away. I have no idea if that’s an improvement over the old IR module or not since I never used the IrDA before this mod.
If anyone knows of any better software than novii please let me know. I’ve tried to use nevo but I couldn’t get it to work.
I’m sorry I didn’t take any pictures during the mod, but here’s a couple of the finished mod. I know my wiring looks bad, but it works.
I have
one question:
how much battery power it costs?
Did the battery draining much faster while using boosted irda?
By the way very nice idea
I must do something like this in my ba
Related
Hi guys. Sorry if this is in the wrong thread but thought I'd post up to show how I fixed my note 2 wifi problem,
So my specific model is the sgh-i317m and I'm in the uk, bought the phone recently as I've always fancied one, anyhow when I got the phone home and set it up I had very weak wifi connection, no signal at all up stairs (would disconnect) and even if I was in the same room as the router I wouldn't have any wifi signal bars (unless I was smack bang next to the router)
Anyway I Googled the issues and saw 5 hat it is a common problem, tried all the usual stuff and nothing worked so decided to get my tools out. Anyway here is how and what I did, I'm not sayo g this will work for everyone but it worked for me.
I recommend you have a professional do this unless you have the knowledge and skills base.
Things you'll need;
Small screwdriver set,
Small tweezers
Magnifying glass (optional but makes it somewhat easier)
patience is key here.
Any how,
Once you've removed the back chassis from your phone and mother board you will see these prongs
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*this photo is from Google as I was doing this repair to my daily phone do couldn't use for photos* lol
Anyway on mine this prong had come loose and therefore wasn't contacting properly, I pinpointed this anyway as when you pressed on the back of the phone the signal would boost,
Anyway this is where you need your soldering iron, and a spare motherboard, you could possibly use something else but I had spare motherboards lying around so used one from a crapberry
So once you've let your soldering iron get up to temperature press it as close as you can to the underneath of this prong to liquidise the solder underneath, be patient, I held the soldering iron there for 10-15 seconds before it liquidised. you'll know when it's hot enough as the prong will move, I held it with small tweezers to make it easier.
So now you should have your old prong removed, move this away as not to get confused with the one your replacing it with. Repeat above steps for the one from your spare motherboard.
Once you've done that, if you have a flux pen lightly cover the solder pads, place your prong on them with the tweezers and hold it still, then hold your soldering iron on the prong for about 30-60 seconds to be safe, gently move away your soldering iron away from it and if it's tight on you've done it successfully.
I will post up some photos of the full process but this should be easy enough to follow. And I'm sure you'll be able to find a guide on you tube (if not I'll upload one)
Hope this helps. Feel free to comment with any questions etc.
if you're looking for charging port fix, here is a small tip i hope could help you..
you can read all the thread or just jump to bottom line
my charging port stopped working after about 3 months of usage.
this was very frustrating, and didn't happen at once. at first i had to put the charging cable in certain direction, and later on i had to put some leverage on that direction, until eventually i couldn't charge at all.
it is known that this phone is one of the hardest to open, and once you put it on the "surgical table" it's hard to finish the job without "scars" , so i do understand those of you who chooses repair stores over fixing adventures. on the other hand, at least in my country, HTC repair cost so much that you ought to think about other options.
So then my tip is for those of you who have the willing and repair equipment.
You'd probably look for replacement charging board, which indeed are very cheap, and then just check out one of the many tear-down youtube videos explaining how to open the phone and replace the port.
i chose to fix the exist port instead.
to be honest, i also bought replacement. but not only it got damaged, i've found out after opening the phone that there are the two different boards for 32G/16G versions. so instead of buying another part, and waiting another month or so until arrival, i figured i can try and check out what went wrong with the current one.
i did use lab microscope to find out the problem, but there weren't many suspects to begin with.
turns out for 3 out of the 5 micro USB pins (the middle 3) - the connection to the board got broken.
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so i just used friend help and soldered the 5, and voilà, phone charging again..
note that -
1. the pins were barely soldered to the board. very little amount of tin
2. I've checked my USB cables and it does look like the metal connector length differ in sizes from one to another. even if not by much, it's clearly visible. so it's very likely that inserting a cable with long connector time after time just broke the connection.
bottom line,
if your charging port malfunctions, and you happen to have soldering equipment, or a friend who does, just carefully solder/strengthen exist soldering of the 5 USB pins to the charging board.
i guess you can even take the board and ask for any electronic repair shop just to solder those. will cost much less than expert store repair
MCU Version: MTCE_HXD_v3.30a_2 , from Aug 8 2019 10:51:10
Aliexpress item ID: 32812618751
Hi Guys,
I've recently bought and installed the above mentioned head unit in my car, all singing all dancing with DSP, 4GB of RAM and 64GB of ROM Storage, and been fairly happy with it: It's snappy, fairly well built, the sound quality is OK...so far I've installed the external mic on the overhead console and the rear parking camera which is working great with FCAM.
Now, I'm looking into installing the front parking camera (not DVR, or AUX Video IN...the proper FCAM CVBS input mentioned on the fairly well known MTCD PDF Diagram). I've read on the forum that some MTCD units shipped with a missing connector, and that a quick soldering job to the connector pins within the main board would do the trick... Back in 2017, @hugovw1976 was forced to do a hack job of soldering pin 3 of the FMS6502 chip, plus adding the required condenser to tap into the said input.
We're in 2019 and my unit seems to be quite polished (not the installation or user manuals though) with no missing connectors and quite a lot of undocumented (and unused!) pins in the back panel. I've tried to get the complete pinout from the seller to no avail...conversations on Aliexpress have been frustrating at best, and infuriating at worst. I'm now resorting to the wealth of knowledge amassed on this forum, looking for a kind soul who might be familiar with this particular head unit backpanel pinout to help me out? Here are a few pics:
Back Panel:
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Included Wiring Diagram (sucky), upon close inspection you'll notice that there is only reference to the back camera (top left, 4 pin sub-connector, with only the left-most 2 pins being used...tried using the remaining two which didnt work), also, the bottom right 8 pin connector is completely undocumented on this diagram, I tried every vertical pin pair with the camera but F-CAM didn't pick it up as the front camera...):
Main Board:
As a suggestion, try validating connections from MTCD schematic, forum thread found in my signature. It may not be perfect, in terms of component numbering, but good enough for someone with medium level electronic skills.
marchnz said:
As a suggestion, try validating connections from MTCD schematic, forum thread found in my signature. It may not be perfect, in terms of component numbering, but good enough for someone with medium level electronic skills.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thank you, I know about the diagram, and see that others have tapped into pin 3 (IN2, FCAM-CVBS), but I was avoiding having to solder on those tiny legs....the MCU in particular seems quite hard as to not short anything...I'm hoping that my unit has the FCAM-CVBS input circuit already in place towards the back panel pins
mgomespt said:
Thank you, I know about the diagram, and see that others have tapped into pin 3 (IN2, FCAM-CVBS), but I was avoiding having to solder on those tiny legs....the MCU in particular seems quite hard as to not short anything...I'm hoping that my unit has the FCAM-CVBS input circuit already in place towards the back panel pins
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The idea is to trace back, to validate the pins or identify what is needed to implement front video function, incase the pins might be correct for front video, but manufacturer has omitted components.
Retrocamera
I tried to connect on a px5 Mtce has (Dasaita) mcu 3.4 universal rear view camera on Renegade, without connecting PIN reverse canbus, powering up reversing light. For a while with fcam it went (not automatically) but with time I think I burned the camera. Now the led light works but on the screen I only see rustles and the navigator monitor turns off after 10 minutes. Which are the right connections
Hi all, I have been lurking for a little while and apologize for my first post being a request for help.
I have been attempting to unlock the bootloader on my Fire 7" 9th gen. I managed to make the tablet unresponsive, so had to disconnect the battery. In doing so, I damaged the terminals on the main board (I didn't realize how delicate those pins are). So I had the idea to remove the pins and solder the battery wires directly onto the board (I know, I know...).
Anyway, I managed to destroy the pads (see picture).
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So I started probing about to see where the non-damaged pads are connected to (as shown above). There are some things that aren't clear to me however.
1) What is the function of that third pad, I suspect it is also the ON trigger, but for a second cell?
2) The two positive pads go to VBAT, are these connected in parallel? Ditto for negative.
3) I can't quite work out from the traces if the labelled pads bypass the components in the photo, or if they are just additional connection points for diagnostics.
4) What is the circuit that these components form? Is it a BIM?
It looks to me as though what I have is a 2 cell battery, with individual positive, negative and control lines for each cell. If this is indeed the case, I'm thinking that I can "repair" my damage by connecting to these labelled pads instead. Of course, if these pads bypass the pictured electronics (a BIM/balance charging circuit?), then this is obviously not safe to do.
Any input would be greatly appreciated.
Well, you see how easy it was to damage them... what makes you think you can repair them?
Repair is much more difficult and tedious than simply unsoldering them.
You need a temperature controlled iron, tools, flux and most the skill level to do so.
You get that by practice and learn from failures.
Not being condescending but after doing this for decades I know how it goes.
Many times you get one shot at repairing it especially when you damage a trace or pad. Damaged plated through holes will need a fine wire inserted to replace the missing connection.
The foil traces and non through hole pads lift up very easily when heated. Multilayered PCBs can be damaged by excessive heat as well. Heat must be controlled, applied fast and accurately. To be soldered metal needs to be clean oxide free and tinned first, this includes fine wire jumpers. A lot of little skills are needed.
Solder tip must be completely tinned with lead based rosin core solder 63/37. Do Not use lead free solder. Wipe tip as needed and always keep it tinned and shiny.
Have extra rosin flux available and desoldering braid. Pad repair kits are available but hard to use and not as good as the original.
A skilled tech may be able to salvage it...
Hi, thanks for your input and advice on dealing with such delicate devices.
I have got another with a broken screen on eBay rather cheap, so I'll take the main board out of that.
Hi, thanks for your input and advice on dealing with such delicate devices.
I have got another with a broken screen on eBay rather cheap, so I'll take the main board out of that.
Hi,
I tried to connect my sub-woofer amp to my Dasaita headunit but the RCA/LINE outputs (which are labelled in english "FRONT L OUT" and "FRONT R OUT") have extremely weak signals. I also tried using the SUB wire (which is a green female RCA connector) but it was exactly the same and was too weak.
I then checked these output connectors by connecting my oscilloscope and having a look what was going on, and they were only at ~300mV which is ridiculously low.
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Why are they so weak and how can I increase them. Is there a setting in the Android menu I can change perhaps or is there a hardware modification I can do on the circuit board? Maybe I need a DSP module. I literally have no idea at this stage but any help or advice would be appreciated as I've done an intense Google search and I have only found several topics from users who have the same problem, but there is no solution.
The only next real idea I have would be for me to splice into the front left and front right speakers, but I really don't want to go splicing wires and then have to deal with the sub then 'popping' everytime I go to start the car. I'd rather have the headunit drive the outputs correctly.
Thanks.
Bump.
Crystal ball is blank. We could enter a guessing game
Post detailed info about head unit after contacting seller support
I tried contacting support but I cannot get a response from them.
What I've done in the meantime is drive my sub gain up to max and remove my high level line converter. I get a little more bass now, but it's still a bit weak. I cannot control it in the amplifier application either (dragging the slider does nothing even if I had it connected to the green [SUB] wire output) so I have to use the sound balance option instead and move the audio more towards the rear speakers to get more bass because I'm using the [REAR L OUT] and [REAR R OUT] connections. The lack of [SUB] out controlability might be a ROM (firmware) problem, but I don't want to go experimenting and changing ROM versions because I'll lose all my settings and data. As for the weak [REAR L OUT] and [REAR R OUT] voltages, that would most likely be a hardware problem (I do see 10K pulldown resistors in the schematics which might need to be lowered to a lower value).