Shibby's blog

This antenna was bought from Wimo’s website, so I’ll consider it as an genuine antenna from Diamond (not one of its numerous and probably bad clones).

To do so, you’ll need:

• a soldering iron, preferably a good one like a Weller WSD50 & TCP-S (a smaller one for SMDs would even be better) with a reasonably thin conical tip. I wouldn’t recommend using a plumber soldering iron, or anything approaching;
• tin, lead-free or not, that’s up to you;
• desoldering braid (or the shielding of a coaxial cable if you feel like MacGyver or Bear Grylls);
• anti-flux or flux cleaner (or alcohol but not the one you drink unless you live in Macedonia), if you want to wow your family, friends, colleagues and neighbors with shiny solderings;
• a cutter with a breakaway blade (it can be a dull one, we won’t cut anything with it anyway);
• an universal programmer with a TSOP48 adapter (you can find really cheap adapters on ebay or aliexpress).

The universal programmer is certainly the missing device on your workshop but you might have access to one at the university, at work or at your local electronics shop. You can e-mail me in last resort but you should check the shipping costs to/from France first because it might be more costly than a new device.

05/01/2015:

The whole detailed procedure for desoldering & soldering the chip is now available ->HERE<-.
The second procedure for building a working Flash image and programming it is available ->HERE<-.

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Please note that the first release of each document (Rev. 05/01/15) shall be considered as a draft. As stated in these documents, any comment or remark is more than welcome.

Christmas is not too far away from now and Santa Claus already brought me a gift: a nice faulty electronic toy 🙂
When people usually take back the faulty device to the mall, I prefer to repair it myself as long as it’s possible (and also because I bought it from Amazon and I didn’t want to send it back since I could not find it elsewhere).
This toy called « Jojo pot de colle » (I only know its French name) was supposed to follow the kid, guided by a carrot shaped infrared remote control that the kid attaches to his wrist. Actually, it wasn’t able to do anything else than running round and round. So, my first guess was a battery issue: wrong! A motor issue: wrong too! So after opening it and re-soldering a broken wire with no luck, I’ve played with the oscilloscope around the IR receivers that the toy uses to move towards the kid. One of these receivers seemed to be faulty (no IR reception), but it was actually a PCB issue. These components pins are bent so much that one of them pushed the pad away from the single side PCB and broke the connection to the ground.
One more soldering later, the toy was working like it should have since the beginning.

http://dl.shibby.fr/blog.shibby.fr/Toy_repair/JojoPotDeColleRemoteControlProtocol.pdf

I’ve made a scan of the RC-20 Instruction manual, since it’s not available anywhere else, maybe it will be useful to someone.