I posted in the Rio portables section but I'm not sure any of the main guys still look in there.

Since the Carbon and all are mostly dead, is there any chance of fnding out who the manufacturer of the scroll wheel AND the part number? I've got 2 of these here with the same problem. And I hate to keep generating parts units buying from Ebay when the only thing wrong with this is the scroll wheel and it can be replaced.

I only see marked on it

JPN M(with a circle around it)

and on the front is

40 III

It's a Panasonic EVQ-WKA

See http://www.panasonic.com/industrial/components/pdf/ATC0000CE6.pdf

The cap can be removed from the broken encoder with a needle and some levering - it's just stuck on with double-sided tape.

Hugo

Thank you so much!

The device can be removed with some careful work; the main problem is pulling the pads off the PCB that lead to the pads on the rear of the encoder. My advice is to solder-wick these pads, then the through-hole mounting under the centre of the wheel, then carefully heat and lift the two side legs.

When all that's done, you can gently hinge the encoder on the rear pads, apply a little heat to release them one at a time. Clean up the pads and finally fit the new encoder.

On a Karma, there's very little space between the nearest 0402 components and the back of the encoder - I'd take a good macro photo of the area just in case you manage to accidentally desolder one of them!

Hugo

I actually already got the part and have it installed and all works well... It is tricky on the outer PCB pads to get off but other than that, it wasn't too bad

Can you post where you bought it from (& what you paid) for others who may find this thread in a search? I had a look on digikey but they didn't seem to stock it.

Hugo

It WAS Digikey.

The part number is
P13381SCT-ND

and the price was $9.35 in singles. They had about 600 in stock.

Excellent! No idea how I missed that when I was searching. Bit pricey, but I guess they have to make their money somehow (I remember it as a $1 part, but that was in big quantities...)

Hugo

if you do a search for the exact part number for some reason it doesn't find it. If you do it for like the EVQ it'll give you a list of items starting with that and when you choose encoders it is right there...

Yeah, pricey, but worth it. I will say that this repair is not for the unskilled (And I border that sometimes, but this worked fine... seems I've been soldering a lot of SMT parts here as of late)

OK... here's one for you.

I had a carbon with a bad hard drive. I found a 1GB replacement cheap which has true IDE compatibility and was cheap. (I'm fixing this one for my 7 year old daughter and she has no need for more than 1GB). Anyway, Got it in and installed firmware and everything is fine except...

It will not save any settings and defaults to Auto transfer and MTP and I HATE MTP transfer mode. I can go into the settings and change it to MSC and when I turn the unit off, it goes right back to the defaults. I can set the EQ or any other settings and it resets all of them once it goes off. I cannot figure a way to force it to MSC mode. Should I have done anything special to the CF card prior to putting it in the player and formatting it within the player?

Maybe you can find the old firmware from before MTP existed someplace ?

tried that... that firmware doesn't like all of the cf drives. it just resets itself with no end

I have an idea and maybe someone can let me know if this is a wrong way to look at it... Would it be possible to create an image of one of the CF cards from a 5GB Carbon and apply that image to the 1GB card? Would that do it do you think?

If they are IDE compatable, it'd be easy to use ghost or something like that to image the drive. I can't see how it would hurt anything to try. Worst case scenario, you reformat the drive and start again.

Ok... another question. On my second Carbon repair, I took the old wheel off and all was fine... but the Sigmatel chip gets REALLY warm now and no operation. There are no other components that are getting warm at all so it seems like I may have nudged something to cause the problem. I saw this once on the other Carbon but it went away and all was fine. Anything to look at maybe?