JVC X'EYE Repair

If it's nice and sunny, take it outside for great pictures. If you have access to camera's manual control set ISO to 100 or 200 and keep the shutter speed etwee 1/50 and 1/100 for decent picture that isn't blurry or too bright or dark.

 

Even without decent pictures the rust on the larger ICs is a concern.

 

Okay boys and girls, I used a mini-tripod, extra light, and used flash! Hope this is better than my previous attempts!

http://imageshack.com/a/img921/9580/Pd7hqt.jpg
http://imageshack.com/a/img921/915/c5AsDI.jpg

Thanks again!

M0L0TOV

 

So damn many questionable joints. That thing needs to be scrubbed clean and then many joints fluxed and reflowed to start with. If you don't already have experience repairing electronics this is going to be difficult at best.

 

Just from the other pictures those large resistors need their traces jumped as those vias were shot.

And looking here it's as APE says, there is a lot that is just bad. I think its fair to say that a few of those ic's have pins that are rusted through.

Very difficult repair without a lot of experience.

 

Yup, that's gonna need a fair amount of work. Ape and Tofu are correct as far as I can see. Also, that big slice next to the resistors worries me. You'd be best off finding another X'Eye at this point.

 

Just for a hail mary, where's the fuse located on this bad boy? Also, what is the correct amperage on it.

 

Dah! I'll open it! Gimmie a sec...

EDIT: Hrm! I see no fuse anywhere on this unit. Unless its on the back of the PCB, which is unlikely.

DOUBLE EDIT OF THE DOUBLE EDIT; Upon looking around, it seems the LM7805 handles the work of the fuse.

 

No, it doesn't. A voltage regulator is not a fuse or act like a fuse.

 

I'm almost tempted to buy the Service Manual to see if it can help as well.

M0L0TOV

 

There's nothing in the service manual that will help. Broken pins and solder pads is, at minimum, what you're dealing with here.

 

I wonder if I should try cleaning whatever oxidation I can and baking the board to reflow the solder. Thoughts? I really don't want to throw this away, I really want to make this work because I've been sitting on this project for a decade (it's the principle of it all I guess).

M0L0TOV

 

Youll be able to find people here that would buy it from you so that you didnt have to toss it. Its fixable just no easily.

Dont bake it, that wont do anything for this kind of board. You can clean the pins with a strong rubbing alcohol, like 91%.

 

Baking doesn't help bga either, unless you give it enough heat to melt the solder. If you did that, it would help any board with solder to reflow it all - that's how they are often made, even without bga.


But just throwing a board in an oven is a bad idea, there are heat profiles (time above liquidatus etc) to think about too.

 

APE's entire phrase is key.

Elbow grease. Scrub this thing.

You probably want to desolder those resistors and extra gobs of solder in that trouble spot that tends to stick out first. You may need to do the same with some of the caps you already replaced. Scrub the entire board front and back. Get it clean. Get it dry. Check your joints and pads to make sure they are clean, apply a bit of flux and some solder to improve the connections. You should be able to use a multimeter to verify continuity from the through-hole areas (that you hopefully just restored) to the next point (SMD component, through-hole, ground plane, whatever) even before you solder back in any component you removed for your work.

If you don't feel like you have the time or patience to do this, then I would definitely recommend selling it off to someone here or elsewhere and then use the money gained + a little extra to purchase a working X'Eye.

 

I'd happily buy it to give it a shot. Or at least give a shot at repair for the owner.

Lack of experience here is going to make it worse rather than better.

 

Sure, I can send it to you so you can take a whack at it. Just PM me and we can discuss further.

M0L0TOV

 

Wow, cool to see that there's a community to help with X'eye repairs here. I'm in the same position as molotov, I bought a "non-working" x'eye being confident that I could fix it myself, but I'm dealing with a bit of corrosion around the IC's as well. I'll create a new thread for it, but good luck getting this unit fixed. Cleaning is definitely the first step, but man those traces and IC points look bad.

 

a LOT of ASIC corrosion in those pics it looks like. Going to need one helluva day of trace repairs and probably even then you will need to replace some of those ICs to boot.

If anyone wants to sell me their broken X'Eye I am in the market for one I'd like to take a stab at one of these rather difficult repairs and have an extra chipset for one laying around.

-Segasonicfan

 

Just requested to join the Facebook group as well. I've got an X'Eye with a non-working CD-ROM I believe. Genesis side works fine. Excited to join!