Opening up a PVR remote controller

Spunger

I've found just dissembling the remote to the component parts and running them under a cold tap works well. Perhaps also a gentle rub with your fingers using a bit of washing up liquid. Rinse off, pat dry in a paper towel and leave everything in a warm place for perhaps a day to thoroughly dry off before re-assembly.

I prefer to start off with the plastic ones, or the corner of an old credit card, less likely to damage it.

IPA will dry off much quicker.

Step one in this sort of thing is to look for any stick-on parts - labels, rubber feet, etc - under which might be lurking hidden screws. Undo any you find.

Once that's taken care of, feel around the join for where the plastic clips are likely to be. The case is likely to be tighter at a clip and have a slight amount of flex between clips. Slip in your card at the between points and try to slide it towards the tight spot to release the clip. Then repeat for each clip (probably several per side).

You may find the clip immediately reengages if you withdraw the card, so it may be useful to use multiple cards as wedges to prevent them popping back together.

Theo

If you do get in it - You can clean them with alcohol, but it may not help. Most of these remote controls have a rubber membrane keypad. The rubber bit has conductive "stuff" on the back of the key, which bridges the tracks on the PCB below. This wears off with use. I hear some people have had success painting conductive paint onto the back of the key, but not tried it myself.

Mike

Chris Hogg explained on 26/06/2022 :

What I sometimes find is - Pressing the faulty button, whilst at the same time twisty one end of the case against the other, can get them back to working again without need to open them up. Theory is that the bit of rubbling by the button contacts, cleans them up enough to work again. It works best, where rather than the case being screwed together, it is just clipped.

Depends on the way the buttons are made. With those with hard buttons, then you often can clean them, but most of the ones I've seen use a kind of foam coated in a conductive flexible paint to shor out tracks on the pcb below. Unfortunately with time this gunge tends to harden and drop off into the well of the control and either make it on all the time or not work unless you wiggle the button about. At that point, if it is this type bin the thing, since I've tried gluing on foil discs, but they fall off as the button is flexible, Cleaning it and often it then works for a while till the newest layer in the conductive stuff falls off, eventually leaving you with no conductive stuff at all.

I wonder sometimes if people who make Remotes expect them to go wrong and hence you buy a new complete unit as by then the new ones are incompatible with the old boxes.

I'd personally like to see, under a cover on these boxes, a duplicate keypad, but that ship has sailed. I remember my Gurundig and Sony vcrs both had such a set of buttons. Brian

I think "spudger" gets more hits.

Excellent - a result! I raided the kitchen drawers for a variety of 'spudgers' (small, sharp kitchen knives) and got a thick leather glove from the garden shed, and with a bit of BF&I I prized it open.

I could see that the circuit-board contacts were all reasonably clean and shiny with the exception of the one under the OK button, so I sprayed some switch cleaner onto a scrap of clean cloth and gave it a wipe. Came up nice and shiny, with a grey residue on the cloth. Wiped the underside of the rubber pad for good measure and re-assembled it all, and bingo, it worked, perhaps not quite as good as new, but a lot better than it was and certainly OK as a spare!

Many thanks to all.

Go to YouTube and watch some of Big Clive's (excellent) videos on electrical kit. You'll see him using a range of his favourite spudgers, most of which are available cheaply from eBay / Aliexpress etc.

A cheap "phone repair kit" will give you some useful ones for starters, mostly in glass-filled nylon, like a non-scratch screwdriver. Usually also an 'oyster knife' too, which is handy for watch battery changes. But the really useful one is a strip of hard, springy steel about 1" wide, usually with a plastic bump moulded on to grip it. The temper is enough that you can pry with this thing and a very thin blade, yet it doesn't (only rarely) bend or break the tip.

An HDR FOX-T2 will now be at least 10 years old. Does it still have the OEM hard drive ?. If you have catch-up enabled you are hammering the drive while it is also recording another channel.

Symptoms of impending problems with the disk are that it takes longer and longer to go into standby while showing "UPDT" on the channel indicator (at least that is what I experienced with my HD FOX-T2 with an external 2.5 bus-powered HD). I disabled catch-up and it still records fine onto a 50% full 9-YO drive

India Pale Ale....shirley not.

Iso-propyl alcohol (propanol is its IUPAC name), ya numpty!

You kids have it easy. We used to make do with filed-down plastic knitting needles... not that we needed to open mobile phones, of course.

In my experience the embedded conductive material doesn't wear off. I've normally found the gunge (sweat, oil from fingers food etc.) seems to get between the membrane and the contacts on the pcb - probably by capillary action over a lengthy time. Sometimes the PCB or membrane looks wet in the area where the button doesn't work. I've had a lot of remotes apart and a simple wash has always cured non-working buttons.

More likely capacitors in the power supply failing and the 5V internal power line is closer to 4.5V.

I had a TVonics PVR which twice refused to access the disc but would boot up, scan networks, display EPG etc. Both times it was the external wall-wart PSU that had failed, and the 12 V supply (which still produced 12 V under no load) dropped to about 8 V when plugged into the PVR. It "ate" the original PSU and a replacement 12 V 2 A supply that I found, and was on its third PSU when I stopped using it because it couldn't receive T2 (for HD) and IIRC couldn't receive a mux after its parameters changed.

Nope. Once the extended shutdown problem started occurring with my external HD I just turned off catch-up. Now the STB no longer has to wait for the 2 hours of recording to be 'erased' (while showing UPDT on the display) and normal behaviour is restored and it does all the usual functions like recording and playing back without issue.

I suspect the HD might have some dodgy sectors but the Humax STB is a linux box, so I am not going to mess about with it.

I bought my Fox in 2014 ("Manager's Special", i.e. customer return) and it (and its RC) is still going strong. I didn't know you could turn off catch-up. (I assume you mean what is called Time Shifted Recording in the manual.) Since I don't use it to watch live TV, and mostly leave it set to a channel that doesn't transmit anything (Like ITVBe + 1 on LCN

That's what my dad used to say when he spilt a bottle of it rather than regular Watneys.