Soldering review

Post by **The Robman** » Wed Mar 28, 2007 7:59 am

If you're a member of the soldering club for good, you should probably invest in some De-oxit electrical contact cleaner. I have a spray can of this stuff that I've had for years and it's still going. Not only is it great for cleaning PCBs like your submarine remote, it's also great for removing that gunk that gets left behind when you try to remove a sticky label from a hard surface.

How did you determine that it's the PCB that's at fault and not the button sheet? Did you try swapping the sheet with a similar remote? If the remote has been dunked in liquid I would be more inclined to suspect the button sheet than the PCB.

As for how an "open box" remote gets to be in such bad shape, what people do is when their remote gets to be in that sort of shape, they go to Best Buy or Circuit City and buy a new one, then return the old one in the new packaging. Stores like BB and CC could care less, so they just take the return and don't ask any questions.

Post by **vickyg2003** » Wed Mar 28, 2007 8:51 am

How did you determine that it's the PCB that's at fault and not the button sheet?

I used the TV button, which I know was good and placed it over the bad FF's and it wouldn't press.

I didn't try the CBL and VCR buttons over the TV FF's to make sure it wasn't a problem on both contacts. But I'm convinced the PCB button is bad. I'll check it out the other way to make sure its only the board. It could easily have been both.

Post by **The Robman** » Wed Mar 28, 2007 10:12 am

If this is one of the remotes where you have more than one, I would test it by swapping the button sheets.

Post by **vickyg2003** » Wed Mar 28, 2007 10:54 am

I love my JP1 remotes so much that I have backups for everything.

This is a real sickness. This is the # 5 backup for the 7800 that DH uses. So yeah I can swap the button sheet. This would probably be a good time to swap cases and get all the questionable stuff in one remote.

I'll give that a shot tonight.

Post by **vickyg2003** » Thu Mar 29, 2007 8:26 am

Swapping the button sheets confirms that the problem is on the board, not the button sheet.

I don't see anything that looks bad, but then I don't see that well. I've taken a magnifying glass, and I don't see any obvious problems with the traces in the vicinity of the buttons. Not that I know what I'm looking for, but I don't see any scrapes across the traces. Traces are those circuit lines on the board right? And PCB stands for Printed Circuit Board?

Post by **The Robman** » Thu Mar 29, 2007 1:21 pm

vickyg2003 wrote:Traces are those circuit lines on the board right? And PCB stands for Printed Circuit Board?

Yes and Yes