Good morning all heading to the shed because I noticed the other day that something in here is not working properly. The thing that isn't working is this which is my little display which tells me how much current and voltage is coming from the solar panel. So these two wires here blue and black going to their positive and up their negative. our solar panel input and these two wires here blue and black are coming out. There's the current shunt up there on the negative line coming out and eventually go down to here where they go into my current limiting headlight bulb board and into the lithium ion phosphate battery for my solar crypto mining system. But um, yeah, this display has stopped working. However, I've noticed that the backlight still works and if I double click you get a beep and that means it's reset one of the parameters. So I think the microcontroller is still working and if I click the button a single time, this goes around all the various available screens, it's getting a bit closer. um I Had noticed although I'm not seeing it now that there were some digits appearing on the display. I'll keep clicking that and see if I can get that to work. well. I can't get it to work now so maybe this has got worse, but you could see just some little streaks of black on one of these screens. but no, that's not working now anyway. Uh, what I need to do is get this off this wooden support post and take it indoors and see if I can fix it. I Must know I don't hold out a lot of Hope for this. although maybe there is a possibility I don't know. But anyway, let's get that disconnected. Um, one thing I will have to do is disconnect the solar panel from outside so that there's no voltage across these two and very definitely disconnect the battery. which is easy to do because I can just take, um, this series current limiter. It's a resistor really, but it's a bulb based resistor so it's um, its resistance changes depending on how much current's going through it. Uh, yeah, just disconnect that and that'll prevent the battery from sorting out up here. If I accidentally touch blue and black together, we don't want that to happen. This battery is capable of quite a lot of amps, right? That's it. Uh, taken off the post I've noticed that I'd packed out um, the negatives up the top here with multiple washers and they were all falling out when I was undoing it while it was still screwed to the wall. So I'm going to let it drop down here so I can get those washers out. Um, I think it was just to keep the the connector there away from the surface of the board. Oh, there's actually a ribbon cable connector there that could be interesting, possibly from the point of view of getting that display working again, but I'll undo these final two nuts and bolts and then take that whole module inside. right? Here it is on my desk now. I Have noticed on the back. let's get in a bit closer. So there's a connector there that says power in um, four to 30 volts with V plus and V minus. Now I've just also discovered. uh, this. it's it's very dusty and it has a jst two pin on it. Will it be the right polarity? Let's find out. Uh, yes. so that would go in that way around and V minus is at the top and V plus is at the bottom. So I filled this up with uh, ladders and antelopes? Whatever. I've got I'm not even sure if these are charged. uh, what have we got? We've got a couple of Ladder 20 450s. These 2450s are ever so slightly larger diameter than the 1900s. The 1900s fit in my uh, stair illumination lights and the 2450s don't So sometimes you have to use the 1900s, right? Let's plug this into here and see if it Powers up And it does. and there's nothing on the display. Uh, had this thing connected to 12 volts the other day so these should all be charged. Uh. slots. Slots one, two, eight not including slot 3 have failed which is really weird. I Have to take this apart at some point it's extremely difficult to get apart. I Did have a look at it, but a whole section. It's built in three sections. three, lots of eight. uh, charging bays and number three still works, but the other seven around it don't It's just truly bizarre. But anyway. uh, let's get a whole bunch of these inner Loops out and hope that they're better charged than these ladders, right? I think that's better I can click? Ah, I Did just see that there was some stuff on the display. In fact, there it is. Yes, and if you double click, you reset parameters. So like I say the microcontroller is running, but the Uh display has in some way failed and I don't quite know how. First thing I suppose is to disconnect that ribbon cable and reconnect it. See if that does anything. Let's try that and it's one of these ones where you slide the black Front plastic piece out and then that should just come out. Yes, it does any noticeable corrosion on there. not really. Let's have a closer look. I've still got this thing powered up I'm probably more sensible to disconnect the power while I'm fiddling about with this. Uh, well. I think you can see it quite well there? I mean they're gold plated so they shouldn't be corroded, but uh, no, they look all right. The little dimples are slightly off to one side. Uh, I could partially insert it so I create new pressure points away from those old pressure points. But let's just try reinserting it, seeing if that does the job first, right, reconnect the power that way around. Uh, no. nothing on there. Double click gives me a beep and stuff has did appear, but it seems to be when I put my fingers on various points on the back of the board. so perhaps I'll experiment with that. Just try putting my fingers in various places and I don't seem to be doing anything now. Why would that make the display start working again? I don't know. the electronics is all around here. Let's oops. Yeah the backlight. There's a switch setting for putting the bat like a backlight on permanently or having it go off after a period of time. but I can't see the display to set that setting. So so until I can get the display working again I can't set the backlight to permanently on. Um, but definitely the microcontroller is running. That's weird. I've done something. which means it's beeping continuously now. So have I entered a secret mode that I never even knew about. Let's try: Single press. Yes, that seems to have canceled it. Double press. Oh two beeps. Several beeps. strange modes that I've never seen before. Some time has passed and this thing still doesn't work. Let's connect up the 7.2 volts to it and on none of the display screens am I getting any of these digits coming on. So I have come to the conclusion and the reason it beeps I think is because I think I've set the under voltage alarm probably by accident and this is just a power input. If you power this um from an external Source on these inputs and this will power itself as long as the input is greater than that I can't remember seven volts or something, then you don't get the beeps. The backlight doesn't stay on because I've obviously gone into a mode where the backlight times out I had set it to be on permanently, but I've lost that setting and of course I can't see what I'm doing. So I have come to the conclusion that there is a problem with this LCD it has failed and I've put this in a warm, dry place for several days and it hasn't really. Sometimes these digits appear and sometimes they don't It really hasn't made any difference. So for the remainder of this video, I'm just going to take the display off and I've lifted it away from this plastic backlight bass. You've got a little LED on the side and it evenly illuminates the whole of this behind this. LCD and this LCD is um, Well, I think it's faulty. It will need to be replaced I've looked into how to replace it, but it is an extraordinary thing. If you can get a magnifying glass on some of the traces that run around the display, they're quite hard to see. but I'll see if I can get that on camera. So the first thing is there is a little chip on this display. It's that little bar I Don't quite know how it works, but that is definitely a chip of some sort. Um, these lines I suspect are some data lines, uh, possibly serial power and two of them simply run down to the main board. see if I can show this and go to a capacitor. So those two lines are simply across a capacitor and that's probably a capacitor to set the timing of this chip for things like refresh rate and that sort of stuff. But it's the way the connections go into this glass element that are quite extraordinary. So on each side of the display, you've got some traces running out from that chip and you can just see where that lettering is. A whole series of connections up into the display, you can see the pixel grid of the display there and then up this side I Don't know whether you can see that's quite hard. There are some angled lines which are running into some of the pixel elements at the top. Again, we can see the display pixels. Let's go to this other side. another series of connections running out from the bottom here, up to there and now I Don't know whether it's specifically columns on one side and rows on the other, but it's going to be something like that. but it is quite a large array of pixels. I Don't know what it is Maybe Um, 128 192 by 128 or something like that. Honestly don't know. There's a lot of interconnections going on inside this sandwich of glass. It's two pieces of glass sandwiched together and then on the front there is a plastic um piece, which is probably the polarizing overlay. something like that, but yeah, lots of connections on there. But ultimately it is this thing that has failed now. I don't know whether it's moisture Ingress I'm not so sure it is because I as I said I have heated this up and kept it in a warm place. Um, basically I put it in the top of a dehumidifier where it's blowing warm air out and it hasn't done anything to this. So if moisture's got in, then perhaps it simply can't get out again. So I need to replace this LCD In fact, if I can I think I probably need to replace the backlight LCD holder as well because this glass liquid crystal display is only held in with two tiny strips of double-sided sticky one there and one there. And of course, now that I've lifted it off, it was reasonably well attached. but it doesn't stick very well now, probably because dust has got onto that sticky surface and there really isn't much stickiness left. So I'm going to leave this video there I need a new display and uh, this might be the answer. but I'm going to put this in a post bag video on my next Video So so for this one, Cheerio I've connected it to 12 volts now. I'm seeing something now on the display. Let's get in closer on that. Just a few of the pixel elements do seem to be working now. come on camera. Making this very hard for me. Yeah, so it's sort of half working. I Mean it must be partly working. The clocks must be running if. I Double click to sort of temporarily change something. You can see that digits change so the chip probably is mostly working. It's just that it's just not driving the bulk of the display.