Jun 19 2009

Knowing Your Limits

Category: Personal,Windows MobileChrisM @ 4:20 am

After a lot of research this long night, I have decided to take the sensible route – leave my Kaiser screen and keyboard repair task to someone less ham fisted than me 🙁
Give me a soldering iron and a proper old fashioned PCB without any SMT components, and I will (and indeed used to as part of one of my jobs) have a go at diagnosing and repairing problems. Having found shots of the internals of my phone, I don’t think I have the dexterity required to disassemble the phone, remove the LCD and digitizer, replace them, and then reassemble it all without breaking any plastic tabs, flexible connectors and small components. A friend had kindly offered to bring the parts over from the UK (don’t trust the postal service here, and a courier would make the whole deal not worth it financially), but I think I would just be setting myself up for a fall. Shame, but it looks like I’ll need to wait six months or so until I’m back in Britain, and send the phone off to a professional to do the job. Might see if they can replace the keyboard and joystick on my old phone as well.
Speaking of limits, I need to be up in 3 – 4 hours to look after Anna, so I’ll say good night for now, and carry on with the posts I’d intended to write tonight tomorrow instead.

Good night.

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4 Responses to “Knowing Your Limits”

  1. Oleg Frantsuzov says:

    PCB is printed circut board. What is SMT?

  2. ChrisM says:

    Google / Wiki is your friend 😉
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface-mount_technology

    Basically I was bought up with capacitors, resistors, transistors etc that you could pick up and read the values from without the use of tweezers and a magnifying glass. Soldering those was simple – if something was heat sensitive, you could stick a bit of raw potato on the leg of the component and just solder it quickly – the spud would absorb the heat.
    These SMT also seem more prone to being knocked off the circuit board more easily, though this could just be losing my steady hands 🙂

  3. Oleg Frantsuzov says:

    Thanks.

    I was able to find out what PCB means because I was familiar with the concept of a printed board.

    With SMT, I’m totally out of context. Acronymfinder.com can’t help you if you don’t know what are you trying to find. 🙁

  4. ChrisM says:

    ah, now I can see where the confusion arose.