Category: Geeks r Us
Hey,
I wondered how many other people do this sort of thing? I've ahhem. serviced 2 blind products so far, a braille lite m20 and one of the old eureka note takers.
The eureka has amazing build quality. I was slightly surprised to see that it used 2 sticks of EDO ram, but these appear to be soldered to the board.
It also uses a semmy standard 3.5 floppy drive; the interesting thing about this drive is that it manages to power itsself from the floppy controler port on the motherboard, where as every other drive I've scene has to have a dedicated connecter.
The reason I opened this was to see if I could replace the floppy with a cf card and an adaptor. Unfortunately, the top part (e.g. the keys and the speaker) are connected by one very short and delicate ribbon cable. Knowing what I know about the inside of it now I wouldn't have removed the top completely since its not needed, but the ribbon got bent to the point where the pins on it (Its that old that you can feel each pin) just wouldn't fit in the connector.
The braille lite is a piece of crap. Because the design is fairly compact, they've been a bit mean with screws; instead opting to just cram parts like speakers ibetween the different pcb's. When they do use a screw, it seemed to be stripped.
The stupid thing wouldn't even go back together properly; the top and bottom cases are meant to fit together using tabs (Non of which I broke), but I still had to epoxy it together. I'm planning to use this as an external synth and I wanted to clean it out for hygeen reasons; you would have done as well if you knew the owner.
Anyone else taken a screwdriver to any other blind products?
Only on the zone hey?
I've also serviced a m40, I hated the sandwich design of the pcb's and thought the build quality all together was just garbage. the modem was a standard for the time v90 dial up/fax modem and I dispose fs for not following through with a browser, and not adding fax capabilities to that line of products.
I was going to take apart a braille n speak but was not allowed to. Darn! But I have needed to service my refreshabraille when something--I don't know what, caused part of the display to come off and the dots to come out. It's back to working order now.
I pulled apart my BN m-power. The problem I'm having though I can't fix, as it relates to the keyboard. The issue is that you have to take off the rubber feet on the bottom, and can't open it fron the front. There is the motherboard and some other circuitry shit in my way, and I'm too much of a wuss to start moving that stuff around. Replacing battery packs is a breeze. Did you know that all those battery packs are are just some AA batteries soldered in to an odd configuration?
I've never taken apart any adaptive tech equipment myself; the only thing that's been taken apart was my Brailler for cleaning out )my mom did that.) As for me, I've only taken apart a cassette and a 3.5 floppy disck which was pretty interesting to me. *smile* I'm really debating on taking apart my Braille 'n Speak to see if there's anything I can get recycled from it, or maybe selling it to someone who would like to do whatever they want with it. It's completely dead and the place that sold it I've learned was pretty much just trying to get rid of them; they no longer carry that notetaker, and even then, I couldn't afford to get it repaired anyway. But I can bring up a separate Board topic for anyone interested in a Braille 'n Speak they might want for parts or to repair themselves. *smile* As far as this topic though, I've never taken apart any kind of computers/notetakers to repair since I'm scared I might permanently ruin it or something. *smile*