I don't feel much further along on this than when I first posted. I
think that I'll pick up some mic cable on tuesday and just give it a
go. I was a good life!
That's a shame. I think it's all getting over complicated now. As a couple
of us said at the top of the thread, what you are trying to do is quite
straightforward, and if you keep the infra red receiver tucked away in your
console, represents no danger. There is no danger whatsoever in doing the
job either, as long as you make sure that the TV chassis is completely
disconnected from the wall supply when you do the job.
Get your mic cable from Radio Shack. It is called single screen twin. That
just means that it is a twin cable ie two seperate insulated wires,
surrounded by a woven wire shield or screen, the whole lot then being
encased in a round plastic jacket. The idea of the screen is that being
grounded, it forms an electrostatic shield around the two internal wires,
and protects them from interference pickup. There are a lot of high
intensity electromagnetic and electric fields in a TV receiver, and just
extending the IR receiver with open wires, could result in erratic
operation. It might not. But likely would.
To prepare the ends of the cable, strip off a half inch of the outer plastic
sheath. This will reveal a copper or silver coloured multiwire shield -
probably a bit like TV coax. Unwrap or unplait this braid, then twist it
into a pigtail. Strip an eighth inch from the ends of the two internal wires
( probably one red and one white ). You now have the three wires that you
need to connect to the IR receiver's three pins and the three vacated print
pads.
You now need to determine which of the three pins is the ground connection.
Looking from the front, it's usually the right pin, but not always. If the
module has a pair of metal wings soldered into the board at either side,
like you say, they may well be grounded, so look for which pin connects to
the same piece of print. Failing this, you'll have to use an ohm meter to
check for a zero reading to something like the tuner can, as someone else
suggested.
Once you've found the ground pin, connect this one to the pigtailed screen
wire. You can slip a bit of sleeving over the pigtail before you solder it
if you like, to make it a bit more like a 'real' wire. Solder the pigtail at
the other end, to the corresponding place on the board, where that pin came
from. Now solder the other two wires to the other two pins. Doesn't matter
which to which, so long as they correspond correctly back at the board end.
As far as making a new IR window goes, you can buy IR sheet plastic, but
it's quite expensive. Best place to get a new window is off the front of an
old remote control. If you haven't got one laying around the house, your
local friendly TV repair shop will have them coming out their ears.
Hope that helps to get it all back into perspective, and helps you to
actually carry out the job. It's easy for those of us who do the work
professionally, to forget that hobbyists need terms and such explained in
detail, so sorry if we've confused you, and put you off your little project
.... Stick with it and you'll get there in the end d;~}
Arfa
