Archive for May, 2011

Canon A70 CCD replacement

I just bought a Canon A70 from eBay for about $20. This camera is pretty dated but it has a surprising set of features for a point and shoot camera. It also runs on AA batteries and not some stupid battery pack that will fail about a year after you buy it. The CCD wasn’t working when I got it though. Since I also picked up one of Canon’s awesome underwater housings for this camera (WP-DC700) I’m into the whole package for about $45. Really though it’s the underwater housing’s coolness that motivated me to fix the camera. Since a bad CCD is a common A70 problem I decided to fix it and found a refurbished CCD on eBay for eight bucks. I made a video of the replacement and embedded it at the end of this post.

A70 CCD

It turns out that the CCD wasn’t what was wrong with my camera though. Canon repaired a slew of these cameras saying that some of the CCDs they sourced were faulty. On my camera the problem was the connector on the mainboard for the CCD, not the CCD itself. The latch that locks in the CCD’s flexible circuit board was incredibly frail. › Continue reading

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Wednesday, May 18th, 2011 Cameras 6 Comments

Fix your Keurig

The Keurig is a cool machine, but it has a bit of a flaw. There are two needles that pierce the K-cup, one at the top and one at the bottom. Since the needle at the bottom is piercing plastic and the needle at the top is piercing foil, the needle at the top will pierce first. This wouldn’t be a big deal but the top needle is hollow in the middle and connected to the water supply. When you press down to puncture the K-cup you pressurize the cup so that when it does pierce the foil coffee from the cup is pushed up into the needle. Over time the coffee builds up in the tube behind the needle until one day all those coffee bits conspire together to clog the needle and it won’t brew. Mine only took a little over a month to do this.

Keurig K-cup

It’s not too hard to fix. You have to get some of the plastic covers off of your Keurig though. You will need a philips screwdriver and a T15 Torx driver. All of the Keurigs are a bit different on the outside, but they all appear to have the same mechanism for handling the K-cup. So your covers might be different but the internals are probably the same. Take the covers off so you can get to the internal plumbing.  › Continue reading

Tuesday, May 3rd, 2011 Uncategorized 20 Comments