K2 LCD issue

[K8DJW-Dave]

This seems kind of silly perhaps, but the first segment - leftmost - in my LCD only seems to illuminate about 10% of the time. Is this just an issue of tightening something up or is that part of the display going bad? Not a huge issue, but it would be nice to fix it.

Thanks and 73

Dave

[lstavenhagen]

It could be a bad solder joint. Because of the way the LCD is mounted, the display pins practically "float" a bit above the pads on the board and you have to kind of "bridge" them when soldering by building up a kind of blob of solder. If the pin(s) are too high or the little solder "ant hill" doesn't quite reach the pin, you could have an intermittent there..

I've built 2 K2's and on each one I've caught an insufficient solder joint on the LCD pins somewhere during inspection and had to reflow solder on it. So it's possible that could be what's going on.

So you might try removing the front panel (a pain but doable) and inspecting the solder joints?

73,
LS
W5QD

K8DJW-Dave wrote

This seems kind of silly perhaps, but the first segment - leftmost - in my LCD only seems to illuminate about 10% of the time. Is this just an issue of tightening something up or is that part of the display going bad? Not a huge issue, but it would be nice to fix it.

Thanks and 73

Dave

[Don Wilhelm]

"inspecting the solder joints" ---  what to look for ---
What you should look for is on the component side of the board.  On a
proper solder connection for boards with thru-plated holes, you should
see some solder on the component lead that has flowed through the hole.

If there was not enough heat applied or the soldering dwell time was too
short, the solder will not wick through the hole and even though the
solder side looks to be OK, the component side will tell you if the
solder connection is complete.

That is important for those components whose leads barely go through the
board.  It is easy to get solder over the entire solder pad, and still
have no good solder connection to the component lead.

73,
Don W3FPR

On 5/5/2016 9:44 AM, lstavenhagen wrote:

> So you might try removing the front panel (a pain but doable) and inspecting
> the solder joints?
>
> 73,
> LS
> W5QD
>
>
> K8DJW-Dave wrote
>> This seems kind of silly perhaps, but the first segment - leftmost - in my
>> LCD only seems to illuminate about 10% of the time. Is this just an issue
>> of tightening something up or is that part of the display going bad? Not a
>> huge issue, but it would be nice to fix it.
>>
>> Thanks and 73
>>
>> Dave
>
>
>
>
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[K8DJW-Dave]

Thank you - I guess I should have figured this would be the case. I built the K2 a few years ago, but the problem just came up recently. Makes sense though. I'll probably wait till there is a more pressing need to take things apart before I worry about it.

Thanks!