There’s practically nothing a lot more fulfilling than obtaining a broken piece of equipment in the trash and bringing it back again to life. Gratifying, but also likely much more time-consuming — someone tossed it for a motive, following all. Figuring out what that rationale is and acquiring a way to back it greater is the place the exciting — and the peril — are.
Fortunately, some pieces of products have a rather limited record of nicely-regarded failure modes, a actuality that [Lauri Pirttiaho] relied on for this repair of an old Weller WD1 soldering station. The device, sporting the familiar light-weight blue Weller livery and extra than a couple scratches and dings, had an Lcd that was DOA. Commonly it’s the driver that’s the trouble below, but [Lauri]’s diagnosis unveiled it was the Lcd module by itself that was terrible.
With OEM replacements getting essentially unobtainium at this stage, the deal with was to intercept the info heading from the driver to the outdated Liquid crystal display and send it to a new, very easily sourced 16×2 character Lcd show. This started with an inspection of the show controller’s datasheet, and a little bit of probing of the old screen to obtain out which segments and backplanes map to which pins. A very little bit of situation modding allowed the new screen to suit, the previous controller chip was removed, and a PIC16 went into its location, in a tidy nest of Kapton tape and bodge wires. The PIC does the work of translating the first exhibit, which experienced a reasonable selection of custom icons and symbols, into smart text-based mostly equivalents and sending them to the 16×2 via I2C. The online video below exhibits the hack in motion it honestly seems to be like it could have come from the manufacturing facility like that.
The nice detail here is that [Lauri]’s deal with applies to a complete variety of Weller stations, so if you come across just one in the trash, you may possibly be equipped to resuscitate it. Failing that, you could always roll your personal Weller from (additional-or-significantly less) scratch.
