Hi there,

a friend of mine and RX7 owner asked me to have a look at his Power FC remote control because the display did not work anymore.
The FC is the OLED type, and a bit of googling around shaded a light on the issue that revolves around the mighty SSD1303 chip.
The original display has long been discontinued by its manufacturer, yet there are (almost) compatible successors, namely incorporating
the SSD1305 and SSD1309 chips. The caveat is that usually the resulting display with these newer chips is flipped and/or offset by a
couple of columns.

To cut a medium story short, we found a way to properly adapt a new display to the FC, both correcting the flip and the offset. This
is done using a drop-in replacement circuit board that replaces the entire old display board, not only the glass and foil conductor.
The replacement board has a bit of logic on it that caters for the flip and offset.

The display boards with logic are readily available from German shop https://lcdstore.de/ . I sourced the board from there myself,
but I am not affiliated with the shop.The board still requires minor changes to make it work that I worked out conventionally with a
multi meter and my oscilloscope, but nothing critical.


If generally the defective OLED is still an issue I could offer a repair service, kind of.
I've never done so before, and I am not quite sure how it would turn out. If it's only the display then we're probably good to go. If
its other minor electric defects I can probably sort it out.

This being said, I am not offering this to make money, and there might still be cases where I can't help, unfortunately.
So if anybody is interested in a repair I am suggesting a kind of a gratuity based repair service. I.e., I would only charge the raw
component, and if the repair is successful and you're happy then you may tip me. I could also establish a reasonable and affordable
maximum tip that I will accept, so nobody is put on the spot.


Please let me know what you think.

Yours,
Kamajii


Disclaimer:
I unfortunately do not own an RX7. I am just a full time electronics engineer, and I like preserving and repairing. The aforementioned
friend was quite happy to have his FC fixed, and the overall situation around the OLED issue looks rather desperate, so I thought I
could give it a try. So please bear with me that I joined the forum with this only post, as I cannot yet contribute much more.
I truly do not intend to commercially advertise, which I hope is consistent with the above offer.

I do have proper equipment (ESD protective gear, rework (de-)soldering machine, laboratory power supply etc.) but I cannot
guarantee that every repair will succeed. Yet in Germany we usually (and I do) have third party insurance, so in the hopefully
unlikely event that I catastrophically break your FC they will have you covered.

Only recently I started to summarize a range of recent repairs on my homepage: knst-wrk ? Blog (German, sorry,
but with pictures and completely cookie-free and ad-free). There is also a bit of mechanical going on, for instance, so you get the idea.

 

I might be interested this. I could ship mine towards your willing to have a look.

What are you expecting it will cost? (€)

 

I had John Sobon in Australia repair mine for $150, he also offer several colors.

 

Hi there,

excuse the late reply, seems I messed up the email notification in the forum.

@GeenIdee: I've sent you a message with the contact details.

For the record, I'll source the replacement OLED for about 60€ from the shop I mentioned in the original post. The modifications that I'll apply and probably also parts to repair other minor defects are neglectible.

 

Hi there,
excuse the late reply.

Expect about 60€ for the replacement display, which is how much the above mentioned shop charges me for it. Apart from that, other minor defects will probably not be worth charging, despite becoming increasingly hard to find.

This is what I tried to outline above: If it's just the OLED then I should be able to fix this, like I did before.
Unfortunatly, if you are encountering problems like "after three hours of driving in the heat, some sensor reading is odd" that would be nearly impossible for me to identify, obviously.

 

Hrm. I seem to have a little hassle with the forum software.
Anyway.

 

My screen went totaly dark.

Haven't had a message yet

 

@GeenIdee It seems that I do not have permission to send private messages here.

Could you please get in touch with me via "spl at knst-wrk dot de"? (replace "at" and "dot", of course).
My apologies for the confusion

 

Thats weird, I'll shoot you an email

 

I was also looking into fixing mine soon, its going dim, hard to see during day...
Apparently same screen was used on Agilent U1253/1273 multi-meters and a lot of ppl are upset about it since its a pretty expensive tool.
Anyways, lots of posts about that on internet and it might be useful to us cause its the same replacement steps.
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testge...multimeter/50/

Found someone selling a kit on ebay:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/22456265233...sAAOSwKEthDYui

Also looks like u can order a converter board separately (someone designed it, thanks):
https://www.seeedstudio.com/Agilent-...1309-g-1287116

I haven't attempted this repair yet but planning on it. I'm pretty good with electronics and soldering so definitely will be doing it and will post my results.
I'll offer my help also if all goes well...

@ZE Power MX6 do you have info on what screen was used for your repair? and what conversion was made?

 

I don’t have info on the screen unfortunately, I can ask tho, he said he would give me the screen info if it fail again and I can do the repair myself.

 

The problem with these kits is that the new display uses SSD1309, and the old one has an SSD1303 in it.
SSD1303 has 4 more column driver outputs (132 outputs, the actual display has 128, and the new driver also has 128) and they are reversed in terms of layout, which results in the mirrored display.

The kits that you've found will accommodate for the mirroring. They do so by intercepting one single configuration command when it is sent to the display and then flip a bit on the fly to reverse the display. However, depending on how the surplus driver outputs of the old controller are connected to the actual display they will cause an offset in the display (this may not be the case for the physical display module used in the Agilent devices, or they just ignore it, don't know).
The replacement board that I use has more glue logic on it, and it will intercept a variety of commands to transparently translate the display output.

Anyway, I've received the controller from @GeenIdee and I'm working on it

 

The controller from @GeenIdee is working again

 

 

kamajii. Check your email please

Thanks

 

kamajii check ur mail please

 

I got your mail.

 

Alkaabix' parcel arrived, after a bit of delay in customs.
I'm working on it.

 

I've put up a bit of information about the repair:

Display Repair - http://www.knst-wrk.de/repair/apexi.html

 

Alkaabix remote is working again.

Again, sincere apologies for the long turn around due to customs etc.
I'm working on that, and I'll stock more spares as well.

 

Correct and i knew all that. Agilent folks don't ignore it they have designs floating around with FPGA
FYI, SSD1309 will have offset and mirror issue, SSD1305 only has mirror issue and still for sale

Just wanted to update that i've successfully replaced mine using SST39 flash which is a lot easier i think but does require programming the chip.
More details here:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testge...20/#msg3999520

If anyone needs any help feel free to hit me up.

 

Thanks...
I recently saw this thread and is using the board as shown below.