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The trouble with pocketable devices.
Nov. 22nd, 2005 12:41 pmI love my tiny toys: My wee Exilim camera, the size of a credit card, my Jornada 720 with its 9-hour battery life and jacket-pocket size, my Nokia 6100 that usually lives in the change pocket of my jeans.
The problem is that they *do* live in my pockets- along with keys, receipts, change, and vast quantities of lint and dirt. My phone's sound quality has gradually degraded as iron filings get stuck to the speaker, and the screen has become hazy with dust. Dust has settled on my camera's CCD and lenses, causing big ugly blotches on my recent photos. My Jornada's touch screen has been cranky lately too, losing calibration and causing the cursor to dart about.
So this morning I decided it was time for some maintenance, got out my tiny screwdrivers and black velvet cloth (to catch tiny pieces as they fall) and proceeded to disassemble about $3000 worth of toys.
The phone was the easiest, as I've disassembled a few before, like when Rick dropped his into the gutter. It's shiny and new looking now, and I can understand people too! no more buzzing and rattling.
The Jornada was almost as easy- I love it when the casing has wee arrows pointing to the screws you need to undo. Rather than clean the fluff out of the touch screen I just fitted a new one (from the spare parts machine) and gave the keyboard a decent wash too. Its gross how much hair gets into a small keyboard- there was enough in there to knit me a spare beard.
The camera though... oh dear. The casings came off easily enough, and the main board wasn't too difficult to remove (after detaching the 12 tiny ribbon cables and getting zapped by the flash capacitor- ouch!) but the lens unit was clearly never intended to be user-servicable.
The first spring went *sproing!* after I'd removed three of the 12 screws holding it closed. The second waited until I actually had the back removed, and then decided to launch itself at my eye. Fair enough, I'd be pissed off too if some monster with a screwdriver tore the roof off my home. It was as I reeled, half blind, trying not to drop the tiny spring which I had caught with my eyelid, that one of the slim ribbon cables inside the lens mechanism decided to unplug itself, releasing the whole assembly onto the desk, where it burst in a tinkling splash of cogs, lenses and plastic levers.
Ah. Fuck. Oh well, at least cleaning the parts was easy- a can of compressed air and a lens brush soon removed the packed-in lint, and had the CCD sparkling clean. Now to reassemble...
I enjoy puzzles. It came apart, so it had to go back together somehow! A good light and magnifying glass revealed the tiny scratches and wear patterns where the levers and cogs slid over each other, smears of grease on the cogs showed me how they meshed, and the two ribbon cables that snaked their way through the assembly helped hold it all together as I carefully reassembled.
It took me an hour to have it back together and working- there were a couple of false starts and a false finish (when it's all back together and appears to be working perfectly, but you've got a part left over) but I made it in the end. And now it works perfectly- no more dark splodges in my photos, although the zoom mechanism sounds different.
Moral of the story: If it came with a little drawstring pouch, *keep it in the pouch!* (The other moral could be: fi you're buying a camera to live in your pocket, get one without a telescoping lens, like a Sony's DSC-T7.)
The problem is that they *do* live in my pockets- along with keys, receipts, change, and vast quantities of lint and dirt. My phone's sound quality has gradually degraded as iron filings get stuck to the speaker, and the screen has become hazy with dust. Dust has settled on my camera's CCD and lenses, causing big ugly blotches on my recent photos. My Jornada's touch screen has been cranky lately too, losing calibration and causing the cursor to dart about.
So this morning I decided it was time for some maintenance, got out my tiny screwdrivers and black velvet cloth (to catch tiny pieces as they fall) and proceeded to disassemble about $3000 worth of toys.
The phone was the easiest, as I've disassembled a few before, like when Rick dropped his into the gutter. It's shiny and new looking now, and I can understand people too! no more buzzing and rattling.
The Jornada was almost as easy- I love it when the casing has wee arrows pointing to the screws you need to undo. Rather than clean the fluff out of the touch screen I just fitted a new one (from the spare parts machine) and gave the keyboard a decent wash too. Its gross how much hair gets into a small keyboard- there was enough in there to knit me a spare beard.
The camera though... oh dear. The casings came off easily enough, and the main board wasn't too difficult to remove (after detaching the 12 tiny ribbon cables and getting zapped by the flash capacitor- ouch!) but the lens unit was clearly never intended to be user-servicable.
The first spring went *sproing!* after I'd removed three of the 12 screws holding it closed. The second waited until I actually had the back removed, and then decided to launch itself at my eye. Fair enough, I'd be pissed off too if some monster with a screwdriver tore the roof off my home. It was as I reeled, half blind, trying not to drop the tiny spring which I had caught with my eyelid, that one of the slim ribbon cables inside the lens mechanism decided to unplug itself, releasing the whole assembly onto the desk, where it burst in a tinkling splash of cogs, lenses and plastic levers.
Ah. Fuck. Oh well, at least cleaning the parts was easy- a can of compressed air and a lens brush soon removed the packed-in lint, and had the CCD sparkling clean. Now to reassemble...
I enjoy puzzles. It came apart, so it had to go back together somehow! A good light and magnifying glass revealed the tiny scratches and wear patterns where the levers and cogs slid over each other, smears of grease on the cogs showed me how they meshed, and the two ribbon cables that snaked their way through the assembly helped hold it all together as I carefully reassembled.
It took me an hour to have it back together and working- there were a couple of false starts and a false finish (when it's all back together and appears to be working perfectly, but you've got a part left over) but I made it in the end. And now it works perfectly- no more dark splodges in my photos, although the zoom mechanism sounds different.
Moral of the story: If it came with a little drawstring pouch, *keep it in the pouch!* (The other moral could be: fi you're buying a camera to live in your pocket, get one without a telescoping lens, like a Sony's DSC-T7.)
