[aotsukisho]

After several months of inactivity, the battery was fairly dead so I had to pop it into the wall charger for my phone in order for it to charge


This is another one of those glossy plastic cases that don't use screws....the easiest way to pop it open with minimal damage is to use pliers in the glasses-plug section. Just pry it open


When you get this thing open it looks like this. Just gently twist a flathead down the sides to get the clips off.


Down at the business end (top?) of the pendant. The problematic resistor is the one facing perpendicular to the rest of its closeby brethren, near the center of the image right below the gold pad. I measured it in-circuit and it was 0.02Ω.


Before I got to this difficult job, I did the modification to have the screen display static instead of blanking itself when there's no significant video signal. This is used by FPV pilots/drivers since if the connection drops, you will just see a progressively worse image rather than the screen cutting out completely.


The glasses still work, which is a good sign.


Removed the resistor by making a solder blob on the tip of my iron and heating up both ends of it at the same time. Surface tension pulled the blown resistor off with the iron.


Soldered some extremely fine magnet wire to the pads, and thankfully got them secure on the first try.


I used a 16Ω resistor first, and then did some voltage measuring. Top end (voltage supply) was just over 9v.


This resistor dropped the voltage to 8.7v. Hopefully that would do the trick


...nope. This was 10-15 minutes later.


I needed to drop the voltage a little more. I figured since a voltage drop was all we needed, I'd use a diode and see what happens. A 1N400x dropped it a little further, but apparently not enough. The glasses lasted about 20 minutes before the haze reappeared.


So, I tried using the diode with a resistor in series. 4.7Ω seemed to be enough, I forgot to take voltage readings on it but the exact value will vary from each Crystal unit to the next.


I made the wires long on purpose so I could stuff it in the open space by the a/v jack at the bottom.


This was one tiny ass soldering job.


50 minutes later and no haze. I'd call this a success.

[aotsukisho]

I decided that because I put the original post up in a hurry I should do a followup post and mention that these modifications were not pioneered by me. All I did was follow steps that other people have spent a lot of R&D time to come up with.

http://www.rcgroups....2&postcount=100
diagram showing where to bridge in order to do the 'no-blanking-out' modification

http://www.avsforum....e#post_20516177
information about the solution (yet to perform) for the screen flickering issue when lowering the array voltage

Thanks a lot to the RCGroups community, the Crystal thread was 30 pages long but full of wonderful information. I hope these photos are helpful for other people attempting to do the modifications themselves.

It also goes without saying that this is some very fine precision work, more easily done if you have a magnifying glass setup in your soldering station. I would recommend getting extremely fine solder, I had to make do with fat solder since I only had a 1.3mm spool left. It is unbelievably easy to mess this up, and soldering tiny things tends to get worse and worse the more you try to fix your mistakes. Practice soldering on pcb's from broken electronics before you do this!

[aotsukisho]

http://kiloohm.com/m...lue-screen-fix/

Another thread that deals with fixing the hazing problem, this time with a pot.