Thursday, January 3rd, 2019

    Clie UX50 is back online!
    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

After  several weeks of trying, my Clie UX50 now has all its  wireless
options  working  -  IrDA, Bluetooth and WiFi. The first two were okay
right from  the start,  but WiFi  always sent  the machine to  a weird
state, where the system tried  to initialize it,  blinked the WiFi LED
and nothing else ever happened.  I even couldn't cancel it, that would
bring the poor device to restart.

I tried to find some  solution,  but  there  is  nothing  older,  than
a fifteen-year-old palmtop. You can google DIY repair guides and forum
threads for 1960's mainframes,  but almost nothing for PalmOS devices.
It  took  me  couple  of  evenings,  but after  some fiddling with the
Wayback Machine I found answers.

Sony produced at the same time two palmtops:  UX50 and UX40. They were
in fact the  same  devices,  just  the first had WiFi  and  the second
didn't.  As the form-factor didn't allow for some kind of slot for the
WiFi module  and manufacturing two different boards would raise costs,
the module is a tiny separate board soldered to the bottom of the main
board using Ball-Grid-Array technology. With BGA neither soldered part
has a proper pins or holes -  both have just  a contact matrix and are
soldered together with tiny balls.  This technology is quite sensitive
to any stress, vibrations etc.,  especially when used with a lead-free
solder.

When I found out  (thanks to repair manual from Jynx[1])  that UX50 is
soldered  with a RoHS-compliant solder,  I knew what to look for.  And
I was right -  even back in 2006-2007, when Sony repaired faulty units
by replacing the whole  main board (for $138), people, who carried the
device a lot,  had after some time the problem again with the repaired
Clie.

So one of them found  a quick  and  dirty  solution: to fill the space
between  WiFi  module and the case with duct tape.  It will  press the
module  against  the board,  making  the faulty  units  work again and
lowering the risk of fault on working ones.

It took me  almost  an entire afternoon,  because you have  to unscrew
the special Sony screws,  remove  the bottom part  of the case,  stick
a piece  of duct tape  to  the module,  put the case back,  screw  the
screws back, test the WiFi and if it didn't help, do the whole process
again  with  another  layer of duct tape.  If you put too many layers,
you'll deform  the bottom part  of the case.  If you don't put  enough
layers,  WiFi won't start to work.  After one layer  of thick tape and
three layers of thin,  transparent one, it was just enough - init part
of  connecting  was  quite  quick,  the  scanning  took about  half of
a minute and then Clie displayed list of 802.11b networks...

...which were exactly two and none  of them with  old WEP  encryption,
because  it's kind of 2019  and we don't do this  anymore.  But that's
a whole different story.

[1] gopher://1436.ninja/P/Palm/PEG-UX50-ServiceManualAndSchematics.pdf

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