Slugger's watch crashed, so I've pulled it apart to see if there was anything obviously wrong. The only thing now is the wire to a strange device, that pulled off when I was playing with it.

Here's the watch opened out.



The antenna is behind that metal gauze I guess as a ground plane. I've no idea what the plate at the top of the cover does, but two springs connect to it.
There's also the rectangular device with a rotor on the end, here's a close look end on.





I originally thought it might be a gyro, but now I think because of the unbalanced nature, it's attitude detector, to tell the computer which way the watch is facing. But of course I could be absolutely wrong.
Anybody got any ideas?

And that loose red wire is still off, I think I can see where it came from, but I need a smaller tip on my iron before I get in there.

And hats off to anybody who's repaired the push buttons with a dollop of solder, they aren't easy to get at either.

I thought it might be possible to use this as a spare band, but I'm not sure I'd want to try, removing the workings from the band, I've no idea how the display connects, it may be left behind in the case, with just a pressure contact to the board, or it may be fixed to the board and come out with it. This would be OK if the glass front stays in the casing, preserving the seal.

I guess if anybody wants to try, you could offer Simon some money, and see what he says.

That little motor thing is simply a vibrator. So you can feel the alarms. Pretty common in sports watches

It's a vibrator. Like what's in phones.

Reflow those ICs with some hot gas and you might be lucky :)

J

Thanks guys, of course forgot all about the vibrator.

I've never done any surface mount stuff, is an ordinary heat gun ok? or do you need a very small nozzle to focus the heat? I'd hate to cook the chips.

Thanks for posting. That made me open up my GW60 where the GPS button does not work anymore:


The line that the little lever is supposed to make contact to has been scratched away for the GPS button. The line on the left button also shows a little nick, but it's thicker, so the button still works.
This looks fixable, but it's beyond my soldering skills.

Fixed it! The issue was not really the scratched line, that was just a symptom (from pressing the PGS button many times every time I wanted to turn it on or off). I took the little metal lever that the buttons push out, and saw a thin film (corrosion?) on the back side where the GPS putton pushes. After scratching that off, and also scratching the inner end of the GPS button a bit for good measure, I put everything back together again, and the GPS button works again! It actually works better than when I received the watch as a warranty replacement watch.

I did not see any other signs of corrosion, so I'm wondering if the film was indeed corrosion (from a "wet" button press maybe?) - but who cares, the watch works again. Now I hope that it's still waterproof...

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decrepit said..

The antenna is behind that metal gauze I guess as a ground plane. I've no idea what the plate at the top of the cover does, but two springs connect to it.

The plate you talk about looks like its a speaker. Well, a piezo transducer anyway.

Great work guys. I have one with a buggered battery. Is there any info written on the battery pack?

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Boston! said..
Great work guys. I have one with a buggered battery. Is there any info written on the battery pack?

Sorry, I didn't look closely, but I think there is. I'm going to pull it apart again to have a go at re-flowing the solder to the chips. I'll have a look then.

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boardsurfr said..
>>> I did not see any other signs of corrosion, so I'm wondering if the film was indeed corrosion (from a "wet" button press maybe?) - but who cares, the watch works again. Now I hope that it's still waterproof...

Good theory Peter, My GPS button started to play up, but it's since come good. And I definitely had water ingress via that button. I was wearing the watch over a bunched up spray jacket, when I crashed the jacket activated the gps kbutton under water, putting the watch to sleep, and causing condensation on the face. The advice was to clamp the buttons down and leave in a hot dry place, which I did, and it's been OK. But gps button getting hard to operate and then coming good could be a sign of corrosion building up, then getting worn off with more use.

Fingers crossed, for still waterproof.

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FormulaNova said..
The plate you talk about looks like its a speaker. Well, a piezo transducer anyway.

So we have a vibrator and a buzzer? The watch certainly gives an audio indication that the hour is up, that I can't hear while sailing. But you'd think you could still feel a vibrator

Thanks, Decrepit. Thought I might as well pull mine apart. Here is the pic for anyone interested.

Great that just confirms the red wire goes where I thought it did.

From playing around with lipo batteries for my DIY logger, it appears the first numbers before the mAh number are the dimensions. But there doesn't seem to be an agreed format. Some give thickness first others give it last.

You could try core electronics if you want an ausie dealer.
But I just had no luck there, they're either too big or too small.
Here's what I found on ebay.


But this looks too long and narrow, it's 5mm thick 20mm wide and 30mm long.

This looks better. It's 6mm thick, 20mm wide and 25mm long

I can't read the dimensions on your pic, is it 5 24 25? Not quite the same, but the one above may fit.

Boston,
How can you be sure it is the battery that has failed rather than the battery recharging circuit.
Have you tried charging the battery from an external source?

Yes Andy, it could be the battery charging circuit. But batteries tend to fail more often in things than the charging circuits, I find. I can buy a battery for $10 and its a five minute job to install it. Worth a shot I reckon.
Thanks, Decrepit. I have ordered the 602025. The dimensions are about the same as the faulty unit.

Decrepit, one of these set to 500C for 4-5 seconds and a bit of liquid flux on the component you want to reflow.


Not essential if you're quick, but I like to put Kapton sticky tape on the bits I don't want to heat when repairing rare/expensive equipment. If you can find an electronics (mobile phone ?) repair shop in Perth, they will be able to do this for you. Good luck !

Nb/ You have to take the circuit board out. Don't do the above when it's in the watch.

Thanks jn1, but I certainly won't be buying one of those at $900 to fix my mates $300 watch?

I'll get Simon to look at this thread, and see if he wants me to have a go for free with my hot air gun, or if he wants to pay a phone fixer to have a go.

I think Simon just won a watch in the Nautical Mile comp.

That's certainly a better price!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Simon won a walker, not the same as a GW60, but he's given me the go ahead to have a play. So I'll see how I go at getting the board out of the watch.
Back with pics later

Great pics!

If you are looking at hot air soldering, you can get by with a heat gun, at work we have a few Ozito heat guns from Bunnings that we use for soldering from time to time. Mine has an adjustable heat setting and I calibrated it by practising on junk pcb and components until I felt the heat was right for the components I was working with. I use pieces of metal to cover over areas that don't want too much heat (eg plastic parts). On saying this, we use the heat guns on PCBs much larger that the watch, and we have a proper re flow heat gun with different sized nozzles that I would use on the watch.

Its probably obvious, the watch housing, battery, wires will not like the heat so keep up trying to get the PCB out if you want go down the path of using hot air.

Its interesting to see what is inside. Locos got what looks like small patch GPS antenna with minimum ground plane working well enough for the accuracy required.

The Windbond W25Q256FVE is a 256Mbit (32Mbyte) serial flash IC, Locos says they can store 1,000,000 gps points, so their GPS packet size for storing seem to be 32bytes VS ublox ubx 100bytes.

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Boston! said..
>> Decrepit. I have ordered the 602025. The dimensions are about the same as the faulty unit.

Juliene has just reminded me that some batteries have in built protection and some don't. It's hard to tell by the pics, but if there's inbuilt protection there'll be a few components on a pcb under the plastic at the end. Just make sure the one you buy is the same as the one in there.

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srtgumbee said..
Great pics!

If you are looking at hot air soldering, you can get by with a heat gun, at work we have a few Ozito heat guns from Bunnings that we use for soldering from time to time. Mine has an adjustable heat setting and I calibrated it by practising on junk pcb and components until I felt the heat was right for the components I was working with. I use pieces of metal to cover over areas that don't want too much heat (eg plastic parts). On saying this, we use the heat guns on PCBs much larger that the watch, and we have a proper re flow heat gun with different sized nozzles that I would use on the watch.

Its probably obvious, the watch housing, battery, wires will not like the heat so keep up trying to get the PCB out if you want go down the path of using hot air.

Its interesting to see what is inside. Locos got what looks like small patch GPS antenna with minimum ground plane working well enough for the accuracy required.

The Windbond W25Q256FVE is a 256Mbit (32Mbyte) serial flash IC, Locos says they can store 1,000,000 gps points, so their GPS packet size for storing seem to be 32bytes VS ublox ubx 100bytes.

Thanks Mate, I tried the heat gun yesterday on a piece of solder, the low setting turns it into toothpaste after several seconds. High just disintegrated it almost instantly. So I'll need to experiment on some old boards first, that's if I can get the board out without destroying anything.
Windsurfing today ,so it will have to wait.

yes the .sbp file is about a third of the size of the .ubx file with only the NAV-PVT sentence.

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decrepit said..

Boston! said..
>> Decrepit. I have ordered the 602025. The dimensions are about the same as the faulty unit.

Juliene has just reminded me that some batteries have in built protection and some don't. It's hard to tell by the pics, but if there's inbuilt protection there'll be a few components on a pcb under the plastic at the end. Just make sure the one you buy is the same as the one in there.

Thanks. The new one does have short circuit, over temp, discharge protection, etcetera. It seems to have similar auxiliary components as the original. Here's hoping its compatible!

Decrepit: Yeah, naturally you won't buy one of those unless your an experimenter or commercial (like me). This just gives you an example of what one looks like. Yes, I calibrate the heat and gas rate on a sacrificial PCB first before I start the repair. Depends how much experience you have. You want to be able to remove and fit a component within 5 seconds each (dwell time). Any more than that then you're settings or technique are wrong. Datasheets of components have total dwell times you can't exceed. Hot and quick, that's the trick.

Just because I can't connect it in UMS mode, (where it's stuck) I assumed it won'y connect to the update utility. This could be wrong, so I'm going to try reloading firmware first. Fingers crossed I can get this to work!

My GW60 failed a couple of weeks ago and I finally got around to pulling it apart. All looks pretty good inside (except for the wire that pulled off the board connected to the buzzer motor, so that bit is going in the bin, never felt it buzz anyway), but it is pretty clear that the cause is a battery failure.

One corner of the battery has a nick in it with a white residue around it, so my guess is that this isn't a good sign.


According to Decrepit's deciphering of the code on the battery it looks like a 5mm or 5.5mm x 24mm x 25mm, 250mAh battery:



Apart from that the inside of the watch looks good, no apparent corrosion or wear on the button contacts:



So it looks like a good candidate for repair, so problem is a battery. The best I have found is this:

I like the way the tolerances on the length and width are plus or minus 2mm, so no way of knowing whether if it will actually fit. Anyway, I'm going to order a couple and see how it goes. Seabreeze doesn't seem to like me posting a link to the battery web site, if anyone wants the link details let me know

Fingers crossed Andrew, one of them fits..

I haven't been in the mood to experiment with heat Guns, So Simon's is still in one piece.

The Up and GPS buttons on mine are getting flaky, so another one may be coming apart soon.

Hi Mike, will be interesting to see how much variance there is in the sizing, hopefully they will be consistent in their dimensions.

I ended up ordering 3 as a precaution, as the batteries were cheap ($7) but the postage was expensive, so I may have spares available if you need one.

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boardsurfr said..
Thanks for posting. That made me open up my GW60 where the GPS button does not work anymore:


The line that the little lever is supposed to make contact to has been scratched away for the GPS button. The line on the left button also shows a little nick, but it's thicker, so the button still works.
This looks fixable, but it's beyond my soldering skills.

Just wondering if this product is any good. Have you tried or no anyone that has?

My stainless contacts on the outside of the watch are starting to corrode so I thought maybe this conductive waterproof glue with silver in it might work?

https://www.gearbest.com/soldering-supplies/pp_009373456200.html

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boardsurfr said..
Thanks for posting. That made me open up my GW60 where the GPS button does not work anymore:


The line that the little lever is supposed to make contact to has been scratched away for the GPS button. The line on the left button also shows a little nick, but it's thicker, so the button still works.
This looks fixable, but it's beyond my soldering skills.

Just wondering if this product is any good. Have you tried or no anyone that has?

My stainless contacts on the outside of the watch are starting to corrode so I thought maybe this conductive waterproof glue with silver in it might work?

https://www.gearbest.com/soldering-supplies/pp_009373456200.html

Hey Cocky i tried the conductive paint with my first watch which didnt work so well. I ended up finely soldering the contacts on the circuit board which worked ok for months, it was the battery that failed the same as Paceys. It leaked on the circuit board which i figured would die a slow death so i got a new one.