I think I am going to cry...

Last night on the drive home I noticed a rather unpleasant stink of burning plastic. After looking around I realized the Empeg didn't advance to the next song and showed no sign of life. I immediately yanked it from the sled in a panic. Tears welling in my eyes, I gingerly reseated "Dexter's Brain" in to the sled. No boot... No reassuring blue pulse... Nothing.

When I returned home I tried the AC adapter to no avail. A frantic search of the board and FAQ showed the slim possibility that there might be a self resetting fuse at work. Tried it this morning and still nothing...

I did leave the Empeg in my trunk for a few cold hours before the drive. I had too much to carry inside, and fully intended to return and bring my baby inside. But drinks were offered, talked ensued... I forgot. Could whatever happened be due to the cold? It was just below freezing when I left, but I didn't notice the Empeg being unusually cold when I placed it in the sled... It worked fine for about 15 minutes of driving before I noticed the silence and the smell.

I'm heading out now in shameful silence to pick up the proper tools to peak inside for any physical burning. The FAQ mentions things to look for in the MK1, but this is a MK2. Anything I should be looking for besides obvious scorch marks? I have yet to try connecting to the player with hyper-terminal to see if the player itself is okay, but I don't have much hope...

Thanks.

try to discover where the smell came from. could be your biggest clue

A bad stink sounds like a burnt capacitor. They should be easy to see.

idno, he mentioned a smell of plastic. ive never smelt a bad/blown capacitor that dint smell like some sort of bad fish. perhaps
as is, ive never ever smelled one that smelled of plastic

Depends on the type of capacitor. The electrolyte in most electrolytic capacitors when they blow will smell pretty bad and fishy. A polyester film capacitor however will give off a nasty burnt plastic smell if they blow for some reason.

Thanks for the quick responses... The smell is hard to describe. It's sort of a pungent burning vinyl smell, not really something I would call fishy. It seems to be most pronounced near the AC adapter port, but it's noticeable everywhere. I can smell it from here.

I am currently trying the hyper-terminal trick, but I'm having non-empeg related difficulties...

i say open it up. fairly simple to do. and if its a large smell chances are its a big enough problem to be visible to the naked eye. get your nose in there and locate the strongest section. look out for fumes though.

Even though I heard no disks spinning up, I tried connecting with Hyper-Term with no results. I'm heading to the hardware store for some smaller hex bits...

thanks for all help...

Could whatever happened be due to the cold?

Probably not.

I have started my player many times (hundreds?) at temperatures colder than that and it has yet to catch on fire or do other unpleasant things.

tanstaafl.

Well I just opened it up and I didn't see anything obviously "blowed-up." I did find that the knob side shock mounts had come free of the metal bracket. After setting the bracket aside and sniffing around I noticed a small screw wedged between where the AC plug goes and the uh... dark cube shaped thing with a four leaf clover shaped thingy on top.

Turns out this screw was one of the eight that hold the drives to the mounting tray. My empeg has always had an odd rattle to it, but I was under the impression this was a normal sound from the laptop drives. It could have been bouncing around in there for years...

So I'm at a loss here... nothing else seems obviously scorched or broken. I tried powering up after replacing the screw and rubber shocks and still nothing happens... If it is one of the fuses on the mainboard it should be fairly obvious, right? there isn't anything under the board I should check is there?

...and it's good to hear this is probably not due to the cold. I feel a little less guilty.

My empeg has always had an odd rattle to it, but I was under the impression this was a normal sound from the laptop drives.

Yeah, that's why I put the following text in this FAQ entry...

Note: This is not to be confused with the obvious and unmistakable sound of a loose screw rattling around inside the casing of the player. If you really do have a loose screw, it is critical that you fix the problem right away before applying power to the player again. If the screw contacts certain components on the motherboard when powered, it could cause permanent damage to the player. If you have a loose screw, and it turns out to have been one of the drive-mounting screws, make sure to tighten all the screws securely and use threadlock compound or some other means to ensure that they don't come loose again.

Anyway, if you happen to know exactly what bits the screw was touching, perhaps Hugo or Patrick will have an idea of which components might have got blown in the process and it might be fairly easy to fix.

dark cube shaped thing with a four leaf clover shaped thingy on top.


God, I love it when you talk all technical like that....



tanstaafl.

Heh... ouch. I've been FAQed.

I remember that FAQ entry. I hope that is not the case, since my fear of screwing something up by opening the Empeg was greater than my belief something was wrong.

If it helps, when I opened it the screw was fairly tightly wedged between the side of the case and the small flat silver thingy... You know... the one between the black cubic thingy and where the wires attach to the main board.

Maybe I should have taken a couple of credits of electronics when I was still in school.

I've not got my empeg open but the flat silver thingy is probably a SMD capacitor. Chances are that you shorted the capacitor to the casing and blown something. If you're lucky then it's just a fuse or that capacitor...

Any one else here remember the articles about all the bad electrolitic caps running around from a couple years ago. It was affecting motherboards, power supplies, and most importantly my Graphite Airport which gave up the ghost last Sunday. Digging around the net, I found a web page about the Airport that detailed replacing a couple of cap's in the power circuit. Mine, when I looked had one cap bulged at the top and one with the seal on the bottom blown. But not obviously. Replacing both got things going again.

I hope this isn't the first of a wave.

The small flat silver thingy is known to technical people as a 'fuse'. The side of the case is known as 'grounded'. The screw is known as a 'short'. The result is know as 'not good'

The likelyhood is that either the fuse has blown permanently, or a track or one of the protection diodes has burned out. These are all repairable faults, but will require the PCB to be removed and carefully checked.

pca

The small flat silver thingy is known to technical people as a 'fuse'. The side of the case is known as 'grounded'. The screw is known as a 'short'. The result is know as 'not good'

You've got such a great way with words, Patrick.

Heh... Now that I understand.

I took another look at it today. In the cold harsh light of morning I found the little bugger. It's the fairly obviously fried component in the supplied image.



What is that thing? It is fairly close to where the screw ended up, so I assume that might have been the culprit. I'm guessing replacing that little thing would be fairly easy for someone with any soldiering skills. Sadly, my only experience is some ham fisted radio repairs with a wood burning kit. . Either I have to find a local electrician I trust with my baby or wait for Rob to be available for a fix I guess...

Thanks for helping me through this sad time.

> Any one else here remember the articles about all the bad
> electrolitic caps running around from a couple years ago.

I chuckled when I saw that (and got my airport RMA'd immediately). Why? My '89 Plymouth Colt's ECU blew a cap in the parking lot, killing the car. Disassembly showed that the cap had not only blown, but destroyed much of the board around it in the process. Replacing the cap myself proved fruitless. Sending it to a "we'll charge $300 if we can fix it, or ship it back for free otherwise" place proved fruitless (and they'd seen scores of this ECU before).

Mitsubishi wanted ~$1000 for a new ECU. I finally found a used one at a "satellite-linked" parts company (read: scrapyard) in Minnesota for $150, shipping inclusive. *That* was a deal. It looked like it had been hanging out in the rain for years. BUT IT WORKED and still does (even though the car is now acting as a planter in the corner of my parking lot).

Course, I was without a car for a month as I called around the country...

-brendan

That is a 3A surface mount diode, from memory the reverse-polarity protection one, which is easily replaced. The possible problem is that you can seen just below and to the left of the diode package what looks like a burned-out track, probably on an internal power layer which has scorched the upper layer of the PCB. It's repairable, but may need a patch wire.

pca

I don't mean to scare all the empeg owners but you all need to really check those hard drive screws. My empeg gave me the no hard disc thingie tonight for the first time, I took it apart I resoldered the ide header and recrimped the cable, I also checked the hard drive screws and they were very loose. It's kinda good I had to pull it apart because of the cable and ide header other wise the screws would have fell out
and umm... shorted somthing
By the way the empeg works fine again

I used loctite on mine when I replaced the drives.

As Patrick says, it's probably a burnt out track. I've fixed a few of these in the past that got returned for service (all suffering from loose screws). It's a main-board out job and a meter to check for continuity, but in the end the fix is just a bit of wire.

Hugo

Thanks for the reassuring posts. I appreciate it...

It's hard to tell from the supplied image, but there does seem to be a hole in the burnt out side of the diode. Hopefully It will still be an easy fix...

Needless to say, my drive to work today was less pleasant than usuall...

but you all need to really check those hard drive screws.

I can second that.

Last weekend I replaced the 10 GB hard drive in my spare player with an 80 GB drive, making it my primary player. That 10 GB player had perhaps 15 hours total use on it, and the four scrrews securing the 10GB hard drive were no more than finger tight. If I could have gotten my fingers around the screw heads I could have unscrewed them without a screwdriver.

If anybody would like to buy a very low-time non-abused 10 GB hard drive (just hard drive, not player) with no music but player software 2.0 final installed on it, give me a PM. I'd like to get about $500 for it, but somehow I suspect the going rate is more like $40 or $50.

And... a little trick I came up with installing the 80 GB drive. As Tony suggests in the FAQ you should install washers under the drive to give a bit more clearance for the drive spindle... "just in case". I didn't have any washers, so I cut a pair of narrow strips of bicycle inner tube (thin, road-bike tube, not thick mountain bike tube) and used those instead of washers. Perhaps the "springiness" of the rubber will even offer a lockwasher-like effect and make it less likely that the screws will loosen. Or, perhaps the rubber will deteriorate with heat and time and make it more likely that the screws will loosen. Time will tell...

tanstaafl.

One tip is to replace the existing screws with nylon ones, if you can find any (they're readily available from Farnell, for instance). Do them up fairly tightly, but not so tight that they shear off, and they'll stay that way more or less permanently. The stretching of the nylon acts as a thread-lock device. Of course, if they DO come out, nylon is non-conductive...

pca

One tip is to replace the existing screws with nylon ones, if you can find any (they're readily available from Farnell, for instance). Do them up fairly tightly, but not so tight that they shear off, and they'll stay that way more or less permanently. The stretching of the nylon acts as a thread-lock device. Of course, if they DO come out, nylon is non-conductive...

Speaking out of experience from racing r/c cars for many years, i'd recommend using blue locktite, red locktite if you never mean for the screws to come out again. Red locktite has to be heated to unlock.

Personally i've blue locktited my primary Empeg because that the one that goes in the car.

\\Kaare

It's good to hear there are non-conductive screws available... I was telling a friend about my empeg woes and we were wondering if such a thing existed. And why they wouldn't be used in computer equipment more often...

You can also just use a strip of electrical tape across the underside of the drive cage covering the screws to help secure them. If you run the tape so that it covers the edges of the drive cage as well this has the added benefit of keeping the rather sharp trailing edge of the drive cage from slowly cutting through the cabling at the back of the empeg. I had the insulation nearly worn off a 12v lead on one of my empegs the first time I opened it up due to rubbing against the drive cage!

-Mike

Long time no post eh? Well, moving to BFE Italy and playing Military with my buddies in sunny funfilled Iraq has that effect...

Just to offer my two cents as a recently promoted ELECTRONICS TECHNICIAN... (Some damn fool made me an E-6 haha) Sorry to hear about your woes with the empeg, good luck to you. I think the primary reason that nylon screws aren't more common in the electronic industry is that they are more expensive, sensitive to heat, and easily snapped by overtorqueing. On the other hand all of my electrical safe work benches are held together with Nylon fasteners and plated with hexlite--it's all kind of a pain since I have to Meg-ohm Meter the benches quarterly.

I agree with the gentleman that races R/C cars (AS I DO) use the blue loctite. Red is forever for all intents and purposes. I have my unit in a refurbished VW Scirocco and that thing rattles like the friggin space shuttle on reentry, and thus far it has held just fine.

Anybody heard from Mr. Laesch lately? Just wondering.

Hopefully another year won't pass till I post LOL. Looks like I am resoldering my IDE connector. My unit flips out after it has been running for a bit ever great once in a while. I think it is heat flexing of the board, I opened it at home and I think I see couple of "cold" solder joints.

Later,
Chris