Greg In The Desert

When I moved into this house several years ago, I had to buy new kitchen appliances. I allowed the salesman at Ballios to talk me into Frigidaire appliances. A mistake I now regret as one of the more problematic appliances has been the refrigerator. Among it’s many problems, a few months ago the ice maker would not stop making ice once the bin was full and a few weeks ago it failed to make ice at all.

The ice maker is a pretty common and simple in design. It consists of metal ice tray, a rotating arm to push ice out, an arm to sense when the ice bin is full and the various gears and motors to run these items.

I went online and read various resources on how to troubleshoot the ice maker. I needed to remove the front panel of the ice maker and I should be able to turn the main gear with a screwdriver. I wasn’t able to do that in fact it was nearly impossible to turn the gear at all using a wrench and pliers. It became clear that the main motor that runs the whole assembly had become seized or failed in some way and it would be easier to replace the whole ice maker than mess with the motor.

Based on various readings on the world wide web, I purchased a Frigidaire 5303918277 icemaker from Amazon for about $50.00, which was the cheapest I could find it. I don’t think it’s an OEM product and it doesn’t look exactly the same, but functionally it’s the same.

I was very concerned that replacing this thing was going to be a big ordeal. As it turned out, it was almost a plug and play install. The old ice maker had two bolds holding it in and a wiring harness. The water supply isn’t attached to the ice maker, its sort of a funnel that pours water into the ice maker (makes sense otherwise the water supply would probably freeze). The most difficult part was removing the screws. Since I couldn’t see them I had to use two hands, one to feel around for the screw and guide the socket and the other to operate the socket. I bolted the new ice maker in, leveled it and attached the wiring harness. I was making ice again within 30 minutes.

Users of the X10 PR511 floodlights may be interested in Insteon version recently announced by Smarthome. They are expecting to ship them by June 30th, 2009.

Here is the information available from Smarthome on the Bronze INSTEON Motion Sensor Floodlights:

Essential Info
Want to know when someone is on your property? The new INSTEON Floodlights not only turn on their lights when motion is detected but can also turn on additional lights and/or notify you that someone is outside your home. Uses your reliable INSTEON network, so you can also remotely control your floodlights from anywhere. Motion Sensor features adjustable time delay, night-only mode, and 110-degree detection zone. Bulbs sold separately.

Required Accessories
Light bulbs

What’s Included
Lighting control module (with sensor, lamp holders and cover plate)
Gasket
Mounting screws
Wire connectors
INSTEON In-LineLinc On / Off Module (Non-dimming) w/ Sense
6 Wire Nuts
Owner’s manual
Quick Start Guide
More Info
Avoid Aiming the INSTEON Motion Sensor Floodlight at:
Objects that change temperature rapidly, such as heating vents and air conditioners. These heat sources could cause false triggering.
Areas where pets or traffic may trigger the control.
Nearby large, light-colored objects reflecting light may trigger the shut-off feature. Do not point other lights at the sensor.

Check out these coat racks. Described as:

Structure painted plate white with 5 satinized semi-transparent plastic hooks. Attaches to the wall with regular screws.

There’s nothing fancy about the materials or the design. How much would you expect such a thing to cost? Say under $30 at the most? No, $250! I’ll wait for the Target version.

Found via BLTD

I’ve had trouble buring CD’s and DVD’s for sometime, basically I couldn’t get through a burn without a error. I came to the conculsion that it was a problem with dirt and not a software problem. I have read on the Apple discussion board of people having the exact same problem with the the full size superdrive but no one with the problem on a powerbook. I tried using the disc cleaners you can buy in the store. It solved my girlfriends Flower Power iMac disc burning problem but it had no effect on mine. I read that many people had to take their (full size) superdrives apart to clean them. This is apparently what I needed to do to my Powerbooks drive. I haven’t seen anyone else that has done this so I though I would document it.

My (15″ 1 Ghz) powerbook, the first model with a superdrive, has been with me for about 2 years now and I plan to have it last me till the G5’s come out. So I figured if I killed it I could buy a replacement from OWC.

If you try this you do so at your own risk. Don’t blame me if you kill your machine. You have been warned.

There are two brackets attached to each side of the superdrive which prevents it from coming apart, you have to take those off. To do so you need to remove several wires and 2 circuit boards. It looks pretty messy but turns out not to be so hard. You will need a T8 & T6 along with a phillips head screw driver. I also suggest having a pair of tweezers for manipulating some of the smaller parts.

Take the bottom cover of the Powerbook off. There are six T8 screws.

Once you have it’s underbelly exposed you will want to remove the black bracket between the hard drive and the DVD drive (2 screws). Then remove all the flex cables (3). I found the main drive flex a little difficult to remove, use caution. Don’t wreck your main board trying to get it off. There are also two regular wire connectors. One is obvious but the other one is somewhat hidden under the black cover of the circuit board (tweezers come in handy here).

Once you have all the wiring out you can wiggle the drive out. There will be a rubber boot over a post on the right back of the drive. Carefully maneuver the drive out of this area. Then you will need to take the right bracket off. Keep track of the rubber boot.

Now you need to take the two circuit boards off the left hand bracket. There are two T6 screws on each board.

The front circuit board will come right off but the back one will have a flex circuit that will need to be carefully maneuvered through the bracket.

Once those two circuit boards are freed you can remove the bracket. There are two phillips screws holding the bracket on. Remove them. Note that one of them is a flush mount, the circuit board that goes in this space won’t fit unless you put the right screw back here.

At this point you should have all the pieces off the drive and you can start surgery on the drive itself.

Remove 4 phillips screws from the drive. I had no stickers or anything keeping the top from coming off once it was freed. You will need to carefully make sure the front bezel come off the top cover. There’s no reason you should break those tabs tabs taking it off. The top cover kind of hinges off the one side, don’t force anything trying to take it off.

Now the guts are exposed. I used a can of air to blow out the inside (there was visible dirt inside mine). I also used a optical grade lint free cloth to clean the lens itself.

That’s it. Follow the steps in reverse to put it back together (you did keep track of your screws, didn’t you?)

Let me start off with a rant. To those marketing monkeys setting around trying to find names for new products: For the love of God leave the “i” off the front of your product. Yeah yeah, it was cute to have Macintosh related products with an “i” on it when the iMac first came out. But even that got old fast. It might make sense if your product had something to do with the Internet but even then your pushing it.

• IBM has something called iDrive
• There’s idrive.com for back up
• Actually there’s a whole bunch of sites that do backups calling themselves iDrive.
• Hard drives
• And so on and so forth

My point being that iDrive isn’t really a unique name and it’s mostly associated to computer related things. Yet Wayne-Dalton choose this name for there garage door opener. Yes people I’m talking about a garage door opener here.

Despite the stupid name it’s a very innovative product. It’s about as high tech as you can get for a garage door opener. It mounts directly above the garage door and therefore has no chains or other devices to run along the celling of the garage. It’s self contained in a small one small unit.

In the box comes 1 iDrive motor unit, 2 key chain remotes, 1 wall mount remote, 1 outside keypad remote, a light fixture and assorted screws and hardware. What doesn’t come with it is a wired wall mount remote. That means it’s completely wireless.

The wall remote has a “interlock” button on it that prevents it from working when it’s not in the case. Basically the case pushes the button and it works. Or as far as I can figure that’s what it’s purpose is. Maybe it’s a reset button or something but I couldn’t tell. All I know is that this button had come off the circuit board and that the wall remote showed no sign of life. I already had the main unit mounted on the garage door and didn’t want to pull it down to take it back to the store or worse: call Wayne-Dalton tech support. I whipped out my 15-watt soldering iron and soldered this surface mount button back on. The remote worked.

That was just the start of my problems. For some reason this thing did not want to receive signals from the remotes, or so it seemed. I went through the wall remote programming instructions (which are the same for the key chains) about a hundred times before I could get it to operate the garage door properly. Even then it was hit or miss if it would operate the garage door. It was completely random if it would open or not when you pushed the button. What was really strange was it would work better with the front cover off and would work consistently in the morning but not in the afternoon. This points to some sort of overheat situation, a sensor or something that thinks 70 degrees is too hot. Since we use our garage for the main entry into our house getting this thing to operate reliably started to become a big issue. So I broke down and called tech support.

I hate calling tech support for anything, particularly for consumer devices. Mainly because I get some person on the phone who doesn’t understand that I’m more technically inclined then most and don’t need to get the instructions for pushing the button. In this case it took 4 separate calls to tech support to get this thing replaced. In all 3 cases the first thing they made me do was go through the process of programming the remotes.

First call to tech support was after they closed (there on eastern time, I’m on mountain. Yesh!). They called back a few days later (phone message said 24 hours). It was at work so not much I could do. Guy said the reason the cover was a problem was because it was interfering with the programming button. Said that I should “adjust that”.

OK, that wasn’t the case. Next call to tech support. Guy makes me go through the programming of all the remotes. Jump through a bunch of other hoops. Still no resolution. He gets his next level tech support on the phone. Makes me go through programming the remotes. Blah! It’s not a programming issue already. Guy makes me take the wall remote out of it’s housing to get closer to the main unit with it. But wait a minute this this has some interlock button that prevents it’s from operating when it’s out side of it’s case. I told that to the guy twice, but he just didn’t get it. (Why do I know more about this thing them him?) Ok clearly it doesn’t work for sure now. He thinks the fuse is bad. I really was hoping the fuse was bad but when I pop it out it doesn’t appear to be bad. He suggests that I replace the fuse anyway and if that doesn’t work to call them back and he will make sure I get a new motherboard for this thing. I agree. I should have got his name. Oh and the wall remote didn’t work at all after that.

“Look”, I said to the 4th tech support person, “I’ve already been through this with the last 3 people. Not only do I know how to program the remotes because it’s in your manual and I’ve done it a hundred times, not to mention that the last 2 tech support people walked me through it and it didn’t help.”

“Sir, to me it sounds like the wall station isn’t programmed correctly.”

GRRRRR!!!! I’m a pretty calm person, but this set me off. I nearly yelled at the girl that A) The 3rd tech support person I talked to said that if I had to call back that the main unit would get replaced (which he put in his computer file, he promised me he would put it in the my file) b) I already told her that I went through this procedure a gazillion times and I am not doing it again.

“Well, I will have to send this through engineering and the warranty department since I cannot replace it because I couldn’t verify the proper operation”.

Fine, whatever. Just get me a new part. (I should mention that she did send me a wall remote)

A week later I get a call from Wayne-Dalton. They basically were sending me everything, a new main unit, wall remote, key chain remote. Yahoo!!! Finally some good news from these people, I thought for sure that they were going to give me a hard time about this and the eventually result was going to be me returning it to Lowes. Frustrated even more that a great idea didn’t work out.

A few days later the parts arrive. I installed the main unit the next weekend. What a relief, it works just as expected at any time of the day. One noticeable difference is the light control. WIth the old unit I could turn the light on from the wall remote but I could never get it to turn off. But it’s still not totally without problems. There’s a “detent” setting that controls how the motor arm thingy drops down. Right now it’s set in such a way that the motor never drops down into it’s locked position. I’ve only been able to get it to go down before the garage closes or not at all. There’s som
e fine tuning to do with i
t but I never had to do that with the old one. I’m just happy the darned thing works.

Next step, getting the computer to control it.

I had a lot of fun trying to burn a DVD with iDVD this weekend. I say “a lot of fun” when I really mean frustration and the desire to throw my computer out the window. It’s the first time I had tried to burn a DVD since upgrading to Panther, having previously burned several DVDs in Jaguar with no problems.

The most fun error messages are the cryptic ones. “Power Calibration area error. (0×73, 0×03.)” is very useful. So it’s off to troubleshoot. I first went to the Apple discussion boards and did a search for the error. I found a thread where several users had reported that their drives were replaced for this error, indicating a problem with the drives themselves. But a few people had taken theirs apart and cleaned it and it worked fine. Since My Powerbook is out of warranty (conveniently in November) and I know it’s full of dust bunnies, it was time to take it apart.

The last laptop I took apart with my 500mhz iBook. The Powerbook was a cake walk in comparison as I just needed to remove the screws in the bottom and it basicly came apart. In case your wondering I took apart the iBook to overclock it, and in the process of removing the wrong jumpers I killed the modem and the sound (to get a whopping 50Mhz). Which prompted me to buy the Powerbook. When taking apart the Powerbook my Girlfriend reminded me that I cannot afford a new computer right now. The Powerbook was pretty dirty within which I was able to clean up pretty well. I removed the superdrive module and blew it out. But heading the warning from my Girlfriend I decided not to actually dissemble that part. I put it all back together and viola, same error.

Trolling the web for more answers I found this somewhat more helpfull suggestion: “Hi there, I had\have the same problems and all this seems to be ONLY the blank media problem.As you well know, disks themselves have written Media ID code there is information that the drive uses to calibrate itself to the disk. When burning starts, a small amount of data is writen to a calibration area on the disc, using the calibration information in the Media ID code, and then try to read back the data that it has written. If it cannot be read, then disk will be ejected and we get a power calibration error:( So, what else to do…try another media, don`t blame the burner… Hope this info helps:)”

OK, but my error was happening on Apple and non Apple branded DVDs. There was likely one more culprit: The firmware upgrade. I had installed an unofficial firmware upgrade on the Powerbook that enabled DVD+RW and faster burning speeds. So after a bit of searching I figured out which downgrader I needed. Installed it and rebooted.

The non Apple DVD’s still give that error but the Apple brands burn fine. Meaning that something must have changed either with the new iDVD or Panther or both that makes it more finicky about brands.