"They lose the day in expectation of the night, and the night in fear of the dawn." - Lucius Annaeus Seneca
The microwave has been giving us some trouble lately. Not the "won't heat the food" kind of trouble, like we had last year about this time. The post with *that* troubleshooting is here. The post where I finally figured the problem out is here.
This is a new problem. The keypad is not letting us enter some of the numbers. Only the buttons below 4,5 and 6 are working. So if you need a 1 minute cook time, you enter 77, and stop it with 17 seconds remaining on the clock. It's a bit of a pain in the butt.
I like to try to figure out and repair these things on my own. All I could think to do was clean the ribbon cable that connects the keypad to the circuit board, but that didn't fix the problem.
Below: The keypad section is removed from the microwave. The blue ribbon cable sends data from the keypad on the front to the microchip controller on the circuit board. I pulled the blue ribbon cable loose from the baby-blue connector underneath it, so that I could clean all the conductors with DeOxit. Sadly this was of no help. The keypad seems to have partially failed.
I ordered a new keypad from GE appliances, and it's supposed to get here soon. If this thing keeps breaking, I'll soon be better off having replaced it completely.
UPDATE 12-21-21
The new keypad arrived. Now I just have to find time to install it. I'm covering two 12 hour shifts for a co-worker who is under self-quarantine for 10 days, and Christmas is just around the corner, with some gifts that still need to be wrapped.
Below: The new keypad, front and back. I like the blue protective film!
Update 12-28-21: The new keypad is now installed, and it works! The display is slightly darker and dimmer than the old display, but at least the keypad works again.
Then there's the kid's car. She turned on the auxiliary lights (super bright driving lights), and the freaking rocker switch fell off inside the dash. The little clip that holds the switch in place had broken off, and so the switch just dropped out of its hole.
Unfortunately, this car is a Mercedes, so you can't even get into the center panel without special tools. I could have made these myself, but didn't feel like investing that much effort in the project. Instead I ordered them from Amazon, and they arrived quickly.
These are the tools you need to remove the stereo module, so that you can get behind the center console. You insert them in these slots at the bottom of the module, and that releases locks so that it can slide out. That little lower "Aux" Switch at the bottom left is the one that kept falling loose. I temporarily held it in place with a zip tie.
Below: Back side of the stereo module. So many wires! The module also has some cell phone features that are almost certainly obsolete and useless. Whenever you remove power from the module, you have to enter a 4-digit code to even use the stereo again. It's all so weird...
There is a multi-CD changer in the cargo part of the car, where you
remove a side panel to access the 6-CD changer. To me it seems like a bizarre place for a manufacturer to
place a CD changer.
I picked up a new center console panel off Ebay, and it came with all the rocker and rotary switches. Just a few cables to disconnect and then connect to the new panel, and we had a functioning panel.
We've managed to have a pretty decent cold snap, with a beautiful cold and crisp day, but the temperatures came right back up after a couple of days, and now we are getting rain in mid-late December. This is not good. We are supposed to be building up a snow pack this time of year.
Below: The dog with no spinal cord.
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