Hot Tip Wounds

When my son arrived for vacation, the only pin I had in working condition was the Hot Tip, and it had a problem. The DIP-Switches on the motherboard had broken and I was trying to manually set things by sliding the tiny sliders with a pair of needle nosed pliers.

Once he was gone I decided it was time to replace the switches. It seemed easy enough, unsolder the old switch, solder on the new switch.

The old one came off easily enough, and I soldered the new one on:

The new dip-switch

However when I turned the system on, it groaned (hummed) and made weird sounds and woudl not work.


....sigh....

so I reflowed the solder intro each socket. No change...

so I reflowed and added more solder. this time (or perhaps the first time) I noticed that it looked like I had melted the green stuff and there might be a connection under it:

Arrgghh.. another self-inflicted wound!

I ended up scraping it away with a knife. But I have been unable to test it as all the fuses are blown.

I replaced them but the one that runs the solenoids keeps blowing, but I noticed one of the solenoids was stuck in the on position and it finally went back, but that was my last fuse... so back to the store to buy another batch of fuses and see if that was the problem or not....