Monitoring and controlling a JUDO i-Soft plus via LAN

Some time ago, a water softening device was installed in my home main water supply line. Such a device contains one or multiple gel capsules that act as ion exchangers, replacing calcium and magnesium in the fresh water supply with sodium. In regions with a rather hard water, this can save you a lot of trouble with maintenance of valves and the lifetime of water-consuming devices like washing machines and dishwashers.

Fig. 1: JUDO i-Soft plus unit with LCD touchscreen user interface.

For regulation, a conductivity sensor determines the hardness of the incoming water. After running through the gel exchanger, the residual hardness is assumed to be around 0.5 °dH which allows the mixing ratio of raw and processed water to be calculated. I won’t go further into details here, the bottom line is: It works like a charm, water is as soft as it needs to be. The device at hand is built by JUDO and is available in several configurations. Basic models contain a two-capsule exchanger for seamless switchover/regeneration cycles and an integrated electronic control unit for automatic regeneration of the gel. A more advanced “i-Soft plus” model is extended by a touchscreen user interface complete with LAN/WLAN network access. This enables monitoring through a specialized iPad application where the interested user can view total water consumption per day, week, month or year as well as change different system parameters. As a nice bonus, the plus unit has an integrated main line valve which is closed automatically whenever user-set time, volume or flow rate limits are exceeded. This already saved my ass once when a pipe became leaky inside a wall. Unfortunately, the exact protocol for communication with the device is not disclosed, which is where this story begins. Continue reading

Schlumberger 4002: Overview

After quite some time, I am finally starting to check my 4002 signal generator in-depth. The first thing I want to do before really starting this project is to get a good idea of the system layout, hence the “part 0” thing above. I will link from here to the different components as I wriggle through the unit and check them. As there is no service documentation freely available, I will go deeper into critical parts of the circuit along the way.

This will also help me simplify things later when trying to figure out which line went where, if things go wrong.

Clock source (Decade stage)

OCXO top compartment. Oscillator on the bottom right, distribution on the top right. 10.7 MHz mixer (10.625 MHz + 65-85 kHz) and filter in top center. Quad VCO and PLL for widerange signal in bottom center and left.
Fig. 1a: OCXO top.

Contained in the bottom RF block, consists of a styrofoam-encapsulated 10.000(00…) MHz oven-controlled precision oscillator and some clock distribution buffering. This part sources the main TTL clock which is also available on the backside ports as an instrument reference. The picture shows the whole top side of the module block, but the actual OCXO and distributor PCB are on the right.

 

OCXO bottom compartment. Oscillator on top right, 10.625 MHz and 100 kHz ref generator in bottom right corner. 65-85 kHz generator in center and control logic circuits on left.
Fig. 1b: OCXO bottom.

There are three additional circuits in this module: The 10 MHz TTL buffering and switchover for external references, a 10.7 MHz IF generator (PLL+VCO+Mixer) and another phaselocked VCO for a derived widerange signal (49.3-70.7 MHz according to the marking) which is used to fine-tune the RF synthesis stage.

 

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Schlumberger 4002 signal generator

While working up some extra circuits for the spectrum analyzer, I managed to pick up an old signal generator from eBay.

I heard a lot of positive things about the German (actually French origin, please look at comments below. Thanks to Rohit for pointing this out!) brand “Schlumberger” before, even though there is no relation to any personal experiences with their equipment. Seems like they also ran some kind of subcompany outfit called “Solartron” or “Enertec” which would today sound more than fishy, what with all those copycat-brands out there. But when an auction came up for a reasonable price I decided to go for it after some short research on the net.

Fig. 1: Schlumberger 4002 signal generator, already opened up.
Fig. 1: Schlumberger 4002 signal generator.
Don’t mind the tearing effect on the LED displays, not visible to the naked eye. I already pulled all the side panels.

What I got was a Schlumberger 4002 signal generator. It ranges from 0.1 to 2160 MHz with 10-20 Hz tuning accuracy, selectable output amplitude from -138.9 dBm up to +13 dBm in 0.1 dB steps, auto-sweeping and several extras like an OCXO for stability, 20 dB of linear attenuation range without using the step attenuator, an internal modulator and IEC bus remote control. If you looked at the photo closely, you will have noticed that the frequency range is written as “0.1…1000/2160 MHz” on the front panel. The reason for this is the optional doubler module included in this instrument. If the module is installed and detected, the software switches over to extended range without any further changes. Else, 1000 MHz is as far as it goes. More detailed specs will follow as soon as I can decypher the bad scan of a manual page that cropped up on Google. Judging from the inventory labels on the backside, the device must have been used in the manufacturer’s own lab. Unfortunately I have not yet managed to find any service info even though the manuals seem to be sold sometimes, for rather terrible prices. Continue reading

HP 8565A: Sweep time selector

As I already mentioned, the highest priority fix is the input RF attenuator. To get access to this, the control panel must be taken out since the connector is placed at a slightly inconvenient place – the bottom of the motherboard. Unfortunately, right beneath this is the aluminum carrier plate that contains all the RF circuits consisting of semi-rigid coax and clunky metal-jacketed modules. I first unmounted the top, bottom and right side panels, which was an easy job:

  • Loosen the single screws at the back of top and bottom covers and pull them off towards the back.
  • Remove the two screws holding the carrying handle and pull off the side panel along with it.
  • Also remove the top and bottom plastic inlays from the front aluminum frame, these cover up the panel screws.
  • Remove all visible screws from the top of the frame that seem to belong to the right panel (should be 3) and also from the bottom (should be 2). Take care not to remove the 2 rightmost screws on the bottom, these hold the front connectors and are best left in.

Now pull the control panel right out.

IMG_1011_web
Fig. 1: Control panel removed from case.

If it sticks, the points to watch out for are the N-type RF connector and the PCB edge of the sweep time selector. Gentle pulling while wiggling the panel up and down some will bring it out. Remove all connectors from the backside. Don’t worry, the plugs can’t be interchanged. Set the panel on a flat surface, front side down (Fig. 1). Continue reading

HP 8565A Spectrum Analyzer

Originally I was looking around a well known auction house for a digital Spectrum/Network analyzer from one of the older Tektronix 2715 or HP8566 series to extend my measurement rack to higher frequencies, but they are hard to find for a reasonable price in relation to the risk of buying a device in unknown condition. Still, I wanted one of the older models, because of their excellent design and repairability. Maybe without the exception for some very special, custom parts – but we’ll just hope that those don’t break.

Also, in my understanding a slightly older system from the top series at the time still outperforms most more expensive, modern, all-digital-hey-we-compensate-all-the-errors devices. That is not to say that digital processing and compensation of systematic errors is bogus, of course! But at the same time, any weak measurement hardware can be made to appear top-class by taking several thousand complete sequences and averaging. Getting it right on a single try is an art for itself, and designing a combination of precise hardware and just the right amount of post-processing is the reason for the price. Or maybe I’m just a sucker for retro tech, with all its edges, heavy metal and shiny parts.

HP 8565A front
Fig. 1: HP 8565A running, showing a weak signal in the GSM area.

So, I finally got a fair deal on this 8565A unit. I might have wanted to choose its bigger brother 8569B instead, which has a wider external mixer span of up to 115 GHz and a digital control interface, but the LED readout certainly adds a special flavor to the set. The seller had informed me that the device would be uncalibrated and the sweep time selector didn’t work anymore. Usually such estimates contain some tolerance, so I already expected some other things that maybe nobody noticed. Since my original plan was to recalibrate whichever device I got anyway and fix all the problems over time, that would be okay. The fixes will be documented here. Continue reading

New hosting provider

Due to the inability of my previous hosting provider to maintain the integrity of their machines, resulting in enormous and incomprehensible technical problems for at least a year now, I have decided to switch over to another provider.

To complete the chaos, this page will from now on reside under the new TLD

(blog.) muwave.de

For the sake of existing links to this page, I will keep the old domain (mmueh.net) transparently mapped to the new URL for at least one year while this page will already deliver all content in relation to the new domain.

I expect the transition to go smoothly (most of it already has) and hope for better conditions in the future – especially regarding server features and page loading time.

Please don’t hesitate to contact me if anything remains broken. You’ll find my details on the Impressum page, or you can just hit the comments section of this post.

Sony TA-F220

These are just some short notes I took while inspecting an aged Sony TA-F220 amp some days ago. I have seen several of these over the last years, pretty decent amp with a nice sound. They all have some regular aging flaws in common, though.

f220_01
Fig. 1: Top-down view inside the TA-F220.

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Isolation…moat?!

Another +1 added to my count of curiosities and eastereggs hidden in electronic devices. While pulling apart blown power bricks for cheap ferrite cores, I stumbled across a novel, environmentally aware concept for the line isolation barrier (click pictures for large version).

fish01 fish02

Seems to work, no fried fish was the cause of this failure. Worth a smile ;-)

NOTE: The soldering work does not actually look that bad. Part of that goes to the strong lighting for the photo and part to the blown smoothing capacitor spraying its contents everywhere due to overvoltage in a bad three-phase installation (L1/N exchanged).

Acer K330 LED projector repair

This article is about one of my recent spontaneous projects. A few days ago, I got lucky on an ebay auction and picked up a broken Acer K330 projector. I often look for these kinds of offers because I have spent several years in the audio/video repair business and am pretty confident in my skills when it comes to fault-finding. So I figured, saving some money by restoring a broken device couldn’t hurt.

IMG_0592
Fig. 1: Acer K330 power supply and optical path.

First some facts and features: The K330 uses a three color LED module, which promises a long lifetime and low energy consumption. A Texas Instruments DLP module handles image generation. In sum this lets me hope for good contrast and strong colors, even if the brightness of 500 lumens doesn’t seem that much. An interesting thing about this DLP chip is that it uses an uncommon diamond pixel grid for size reasons. Diamond in this context means that the pixels do not form a rectangular pattern like in the usual TFT monitors but rather a grid of 45° rotated and slightly squeezed, not completely rectangular tiles. Of course, this means that internal resampling has to occur to map the image from the rectangular domain onto the diagonal domain of the IC.

So, this projector was obviously broken when it arrived – what a surprise. The seller had already informed me that it had suffered from overvoltage of unknown cause. The VGA picture was supposed to be very green-ish, the HDMI input dead in whole and the media player erratic. A slight flickering in the picture was also mentioned. I’ll take you through the repair process for this device from here on. Continue reading

Wacom digitizer screen

Anyone who has already tried to use some kind of tablet device for writing should know that there are fundamental differences between screen types.

The most common is the capacitive type, where you use a finger or some kind of conductive pen to write on a glass surface, while the touchscreen device captures movement of the capacitance change through a grid of transparent electrodes on the backside of the glass. This works, but it sucks for writing precise text or drawing sketches. You can find these screens in almost every modern smart phone, tablet PC or kitchen appliance. They are cheap!

Next is the resistive touchscreen, where a small, hard point presses down on a plastic surface. The touch element is composed of two pieces of clear foil, coated with a conductive material. While the two layers stay isolated when there is no pressure applied, the pen forces them together in a certain point, forming a conductive path. By knowing the specific resistance of the surface coating, the circuit can determine the position of the pen tip by measuring path resistance from different edges of the screen. This type was pretty popular in PDAs (which have by now been fully replaced by smart phones, what a shame ;-) ) as well as the almost equivalent navigation assistants – and is not that common anymore. Writing performance is fair but not exceptional, though.

The third kind is the most interesting one. Real tablet PCs (the ones with the flip-over display) have this normal-looking pen with the nylon tip, which you can use to accurately write on the glass/plastic display surface. Many even feature some buttons on the pen, some kind of eraser on the backside – and they are damned accurate! They have another thing in common: Most of them use technology by a company called Wacom, also producer of digital writing and drawing pads for artists.

This type is called a “digitizer screen”, and it uses a sensing panel *behind* the actual display to recognize and track the pen. The digitizer panel contains an amazing set of surface coils to provide an alternating magnetic field through the screen. Inside the pen, there is a resonant circuit which uses the field energy to transmit the button states and even pressure on the pen tip back to the coil. By monitoring the strength of the resonance through different surface coils, the digitizer then calculates the position of the pen above the surface. In other words, you get a high-res info about the pen position (easily above 25.000 points resolution along the surface edge, depending on the digitizer type!), you know the pressure applied, button presses on the pen and even where the pen is when it is not yet touching the surface.

I recently disassembled a trashed tablet PC (Toshiba Portege) with a broken motherboard for interesting parts, and came across this:

tablet01
Fig. 1: Backside of Toshiba Portege LCD module. Wacom digitizer (red/orange foil) and control logic (PCB in top left corner) are visible. LCD control board on the bottom.

The LCD panel is a LTM12C328T type. Attached to the backside is a SU-010-X01 tablet pen digitizer, and the marking on the ICs clearly suggests that it is made by Wacom. This would make a fine graphics tablet – but how to attach it to any other PC? Continue reading