Alesis ION and on and on and on and on and on and on and on.
Right. Had a sudden visit from Mr Migraine from about midnight last night so no work today for yours truly, or falsely, what in this day and age of fake news and fake presidunces and all that fucking asshattery. Anyway...
So I thought since I had the time, FINALLY, I’d take care of some minor problems that still remain on the ION. First, the tact switches in the Part section were starting to get stubborn so I thought I’d swap em out for new ones. Taking apart an ION is always an adventure thanks to the puzzle-like way they designed the case, mainly where the top and bottom come together along the back side, and also how you have to carefully raise and slide the top up and out forwards to keep the bottom front edge there from catching on the bottoms of the keys and snapping them off. If this sounds like someone talking from experience, well, yeah so I snapped three of the fucking things off. But when I glued them back I saw that whoever had fiddled around inside the thing before I owned it had also snapped one off, so there. And now, on with the Action Photos!
Here we see, through a big fat magnifying glass on a gooseneck that I use, the wonderful and rewarding process of de-soldering using Hakko Desoldering Wick. Pain in the ass, but done carefully and patiently you can get all eight of these bastards outta there in about twenty minutes.
In the above photo you will find fine examples of new tact switches made by Omron. The more keen-eyed of you out there will notice that they are not the blue-colored deals that Alesis went with originally. Couldn’t find those. I found yellow ones, and white ones too though, the only difference as far as I can tell being the force needed to actuate the switch and the tactile response (how ‘clicky’ the switch feels). I’m sure if I went through the trouble of Google-sleuthing data sheets for these I could find the exact details about what the colors designate but AIN’T NOBODY GOT TIME FO’ DAT!
One issue that has been bugging me in the back of my mind for about a year or two now is a result of a mishap that happened when I first got this ION. It had a load of issues that needed to be dealt with in order to be able to just use the thing. (You can find a post about that here someplace). When I first opened the case up to begin the lengthy process of Doing What Needed To Be Done, I inadvertently yanked the LCD ribbon cable outta the socket on the side where it plugs into the main PCB, half destroying that end of the cable in the process. The problem here is twofold: first, the cable is WAY too short, and second, you need to be really careful when opening up an ION. Anyway, I ordered a replacement ribbon cable that was about 20cm longer than the shortish factory one (DIGI-KEY part no. HF18U-18-ND, cable ffc 18pos 1.00mm 18″), and it’s been sitting on a shelf for about a year now I guess? Lazy fucker. Oh shit, I just looked at the package and it says the order date was Jan 30 2018! HAHAHA!!! Goddam lazy lima bean. Anyway so in the photo above, you can see I’ve desoldered and cleaned up the pads on the backside of the LCD board where the cable gets soldered. Yeah, soldered. Usually these kinds of ribbon cable (or flex cable? I dunno what the fuck they’re called) plug in to sockets on both sides of the cable. But oh no, that would make things too easy! BUT, I do see why they did it this way. There’s a plastic housing that the LCD unit itself snaps into, and the housing gets screwed down to the underside of the front panel. So to save space, instead of having a fat socket jutting out, they went with the solder option. Fuck.
I had a real BLAST dealing with this. First I thought I’d just cut away the plastic and expose the flat metal wires, but that turned out to be super slow and I ran the risk of accidentally cutting off one of the wires so I didn’t wanna do that, really. I was sitting there thinking “If only there was a way to melt the plastic straight off the wiring, like slide it right off like butter or something.” Well. I had a soldering iron sitting right next to me. Hmmmm. You can see where this is going I imagine. I taped the ribbon down to a small piece of spare plywood I have, then just scraped the plastic off with the soldering iron, slowly and carefully, wiping the iron off every time. I was done in a minute or two. Then I had a peep through a loupe at the exposed ends and saw a bit of plastic residue, so I carefully sanded that off. Next was the nerve-racking process of soldering the shit together. My hands shake like a sack of pissed off rattlesnakes anymore, so it was super slow and steady going, two-handed grip on the soldering iron, careful, careful work. But in the end, success!
There are still a handful of switches that are starting to be stubborn and could be replaced, but I’d had enough already and decided to just put the thing back together and call it a day and then have lunch and write this so there you go.
Nothing is impossible if you take your time, calm down, and think things through. A hefty bit of MacGyvering doesn’t hurt either.