Looking for broken Tempest weather station

21

All,

Here are a couple x-ray photos of the Mark’s damaged dome (upper and lower left, mine on the upper/lower right.). Note: Mine still had the ribbon cable attached. Mark’s was severely damaged and pulled all of the trace lines just below the solder mask layer of the board. Below is an x-ray of both mine and @mark.urwiller dome. Mark was gracious enough to send me his cap which didn’t have a chunk of plastic broken that mine suffered. I removed his light sensor CCA and swapped mine in its place. I reconnected the ribbon cable and it responded to a flashlight being shined on the sensor.

Mark’s CCA is salvageable (tempest sent him a new one) and I will try and repair it in the event someone else needs a spare. One of the x-ray photos show the connections that need to be made. There are 3 vias for the control lines that can be connected to the connector once I put it back down on the board. For the ground and power lines, I likely find a donor scrap CCA to rebuild the board traces. I’ll use 30 or 36 gauge wires to make the connections to the board.vias. Henkel makes a product called Hysol that is great for circuit trace repair.

Anyway, just thought I’d share some of the photos in the hope it may help people in the future. The connector is a 0.5mm pitched FFP/FPC ribbon cable connector. It can be found on the web with a little searching around. I used a hot air gun to remove it applying Kapton tape over the plastic parts to retard the heat transfer to the plastic.

Cheers :tumbler_glass:

Map with Markers2
Map with Markers23600×2386 816 KB
Light Sensor Connections
Light Sensor Connections1600×1200 421 KB

6 Likes
22

that’s medical attention :slight_smile:

1 Like
23

wow, X-ray picture. I love them in this context. Do you have your own x-ray machine or did you bring it to work?

1 Like
24

This is a little off-topic, but how resilient do you think these things are to taking hits? I did basically exactly the same thing you did - but it didn’t appear that any of the sensing bits broke off. The Tempest device did break right above the mount where it revealed it was held together by 4 small screws in plastic. The female plastic bits broke. But I was able to super glue it back together and get the device mounted properly. It has some scuffs where it hit my shingle roof on the side of the haptic sensor but otherwise looks normal. It appears to be working… but hard to say if it’s working accurately! I am no worried that I have poor data!! You seem to have a good understanding of how these work - might I have done some irreparable damage?