Archive of August 2013

Toaster Pop-up fix

No, this is a real toaster (the thing that makes bread slices nice and crispy). I bought this cheap "SIMPEX" toaster from H&M in Ljubljana. Type 12415 1233 according to the label on the underside. Anyway, the thing stopped popping (actually, it stopped staying down.. I had to manually hold it down to toast my bread this morning). So I took it apart to see what was the matter.. Initially I found some dry joints. The electromagnet that magnetically keeps the toaster tray down was being stressed by the toaster tray, and two of the connecting pads lifted off the PCB. I fixed this by soldering some splices from the pins to other, more stable, locations on the PCB. But that didn't fix the problem... (well, it might have, originally, but my repair caused another issue..) It turns out that the "Cancel" button was always been pressed! The screws that hold the PCB with the cancel button on it seems to be able to tighten too much, causing the "cancel" button to be pressed in all the time, and hence prevent the latch mechanism from operating. The fix was a simple case of inserting an extra spacer under the PCB to stop the screws from pulling the PCB so far onto the plastic side thingy that it is mounted to. Having taken it apart, I can confirm that the latch mechanism is electromagnetic - there is an electromagnet that energizes and latches onto a plate attached to the toaster arm (this is a relief, I didn't want a purely mechanical system that could wear out).
@ 04:56 PM on August 31 | 0 Comments

Just upgrade admin

I was looking for a way to write to my Chyrp blog from my droid phone.. and it seems that all I needed to do was upgrade my Chyrp admin pages as decsribed in the [Chyrp Development blog](http://chyrp.net/discuss/development)
@ 03:30 PM on August 31 | 0 Comments