That has to be the single worst solder joint I have seen in a really long time. Did they do any inspection at all? It boggles the mind. With the water marks just below R2 and some of the coffee grinds problems there I think a protective cover may be needed to make this board a bit more 'weather' safe may be a good investment.

-C

CRCasey wrote:That has to be the single worst solder joint I have seen in a really long time. Did they do any inspection at all? It boggles the mind. With the water marks just below R2 and some of the coffee grinds problems there I think a protective cover may be needed to make this board a bit more 'weather' safe may be a good investment.

Yeah, it's a really bad solder joint! I'm sure the board is made for them by a PCB specialist, who should be doing that type of inspection.

A "weatherproof" cover for the board could be problematic because it would probably interfere with heat dispersion by the active components. I think a gasket around the display assembly might help, but that won't keep water and debris from getting into the switch holes.

Hi guys,

damn that's bad:| I'm surprised with the amount of oxidation on the board which is normally protected with spray on flux/lacquer. How did the grinds get there? isn't the electronics section sealed and covered from the rest of the grinder? and is that indeed water/other type of fluid under R2? I thought the front control panel was splash proof.

As you had the cover off, can I ask how the funny sliders work? are those variable resistors or are they actually somehow connected with the burr setting mechanism?

Regards,
dsc.

With soldering like that, I can see why they had issues with some systems.

Nifty shot of the CPU. It's an Atmel micro with the following features.

• Compatible with MCS®-51 Products
• 8K Bytes of In-System Programmable (ISP) Flash Memory
- Endurance: 10,000 Write/Erase Cycles
• 4.0V to 5.5V Operating Range
• Fully Static Operation: 0 Hz to 33 MHz
• Three-level Program Memory Lock
• 256 x 8-bit Internal RAM
• 32 Programmable I/O Lines
• Three 16-bit Timer/Counters
• Eight Interrupt Sources
• Full Duplex UART Serial Channel
• Low-power Idle and Power-down Modes
• Interrupt Recovery from Power-down Mode
• Watchdog Timer
• Dual Data Pointer
• Power-off Flag
• Fast Programming Time
• Flexible ISP Programming (Byte and Page Mode)
• Green (Pb/Halide-free) Packaging Option

I wonder if it's re-programmable with the current software or if it's locked up tight....

Mark

On todays micro-controllers the three lock states are program read lock, eeprom read lock, and lock all reads. This allows developers to keep their code safe.

The part in this circuit is not a one time programmable part, so the answer to your question is that yes you could reprogram it. I am not sure if the read protect bits set or not, if set you can not read out the existing code and you would have to code your own firmware from scratch.

The erase-write-verify that happens during programming cycle of these chips clears out the old program and also resets the locking bits.

-Cecil

There are actually companies out there that provide a service were they will pull the code from protected chips. It costs quite a bit though, and they usually want several chips.

Vario display going blank:

About the display going blank: we (Baratza) have experienced about 2% of the Vario's we have sold that have reported this problem. 98% of Vario owners never experience this. As we researched it, we found the problem to be caused by electrical "noise"(from the motor) , not a loose wire or cold solder joints. The cure is a display board with a small capacitor soldered between the display controller chip and ground. This solves the problem permanently. All new Vario's since November have a display with the filter capacitor installed from the factory. If anyone has any further questions about this, feel free to email me at kyle@baratza.com.
Regards,
Kyle (president of Baratza)

Noise is a design problem that is hard to isolate, good job on that. My hat is off to your engineers.

-Cecil