Saturday, August 16, 2014

A question on how to identify Surface Mount Component

A customer and a friend of mine Mr.Wilson from Malawi who lives in Pretoria, South Africa wanted to know how to identify Surface Mount Component

Hie Mr. Kimathi,

In the first place I want to appreciate you for extraordinary knowledge I have gained from your CRT TV repair eBook.

It’s so clear that even somebody who doesn’t know anything concerning electronics can manage to at least fix a TV with this book at hand.

The issue now is, I am looking for the book which can help me with the Surface Mounted Components like Diodes, Transistors etc, as I am struggling to identify and test many of components from LCD TVs and monitors that’s why I have decided to ask you about your Basic Electronics Course eBook.

I am ready to purchase it as soon as I get this information from you.

Hope to hear from you soon.

May God Almighty continue to bless you and reveal more to you in Jesus name
Kindly,

Wilson.

  
Hi Wilson,
Thanks for your feedback and glad to hear that you have found my eBook valuable companion at your work bench.God bless you too my brother.

Regarding my basic electronics eBook, I have not written about smd components but when it come to testing, the method is the same only that smd are small in size...

What you require maybe is just how to identify them and you can easily Google “how to identify smd components" and I am sure you will get a lot of info for free on the internet.

Again if you have an android phone, go to Google play and download an application called "electroDroid" this is very good even for other components also

Regards Humphrey

Tuesday, August 5, 2014

Another great way to test for remote control without presence of the appliance

A friend of mine and an electronics repairer from Fiji islands sends me this report on how to test a remote control.



While I was playing with one remote control of my DVD player, I was thinking the sensor is just a LED, but why it cannot light when we press the buttons.

I brought it close to my eyes and was trying to view the lightening of that LED.

Hopefully in some remotes we can see a little blink if LED, but as far as I have seen in remotes which are produced nowadays are hard to view the light of the LED with our naked eyes.

Interpretation:
May be the signal light is so tiny that we cannot see it with our naked eyes.

I thought to use my mobile phone camera to magnify the signal light and see if it is visible.

I was so happy, actually to see the LED lightening while watching it though the camera.

Here are the pictures I took:







It can be perorated that ,if a remote is not working it will not have its LED lightened when you press the buttons.TRY THIS OUT WITH A GOOD REMOTE AT HOME

So all my repairer friends there is a very good tester for remotes, which is always in your pockets (Our mobile phones with cameras).

After reading this article I decided to do the same test using my tablet and the result were the same (positive) as you can see the pictures below



This article is prepared by Atish Chand, a repairer from Fiji Islands