My VP50 Pro Repair

I picked up a VP50 Pro off ebay in an unknown condition. I received the unit, setup my bench top power supply and was all set to go. Turned it on and I got garbled video input. :-( However the OSD was fine.

I played with all the settings and no matter what; the video was corrupted. I eventually hit the setting for firmware update. I hit it just to see what would happen. (Firmware update requires a serial cable and a terminal to push the update file to the machine) There was no way to exit the firmware from the menu, so I pulled the power and plugged it back in. Boom the video came up fine. I did some more testing, audio didn't work and some other settings did not work, like passthrough. The machine was on Firmware 1.00 so it needed to be updated.

At this point I shut the machine off and let it cool. When the machine powered back up, I was faced with corrupt video. I popped open the case and saw that both fans on FPGA heat sinks were not spinning. The fans worked, but the plugs themselves did not get power? Sure enough if I put physical pressure on one of the FPGA the garbled video would change. If I applied enough pressure in one corner it was be perfectly fine.

I was able to twist the heatsink off; they were glued on. This was the most dangerous part of the repair. I did a full reflow, heated the bottom side up to 180c etc. Once the chip was floating on molten solder I let it cool down. I reassembled everything. And Success!

Instead of trying to figure out why the fan power plugs were getting power I simply hard wired the fans to 5v. I also installed a case fan to get fresh air coming in.

The audio still wouldn't work through HDMI etc. I applied the newest firmware I update I could find which was 1.05 and all these issues are now gone. Supposedly there is a 1.06 beta firmware out there. So if you have it, could you message me!

Here are some pictures:







TLDR: Got a broken VP50 Pro, Fixed it.

 

damn citrus that bad boy used to be like 3 stacks, how much did you pay for it?

 

Lets just say it was worth the risk of buying it in an unknown condition

 

aww come on! lol like 150 cheap? lol 500 cheap?

 

250 shipped

 

DAMN!!!!!!! SHAWING!!!! BAM OUTTA THE PARK!!!!!!!! gotta love those come ups!!!! congrats man!