Sunday 25 April 2010

Zombie Xbox 360!

Oh yes! My Xbox is back from the dead; Red Ring of Death is no more!

I had previously stripped my Xbox, which is fun in itself, and borrowed a hot-air reflow blower from work. I removed both heatsinks and cleaned the old heat transfer compound off of the processors with cleaning solvent.


I had a large lump of aluminium round bar sitting on top of the GPU to hold it in place and put some downward pressure on it while I attempted to reflow it. After letting it cool, I refitted the heatsinks; I've only got some of the traditional white heat transfer paste, so I used it, instead of the silver original paste which is probably something similar to "Arctic Silver" or whatever it's called. I plugged in the power supply and AV cable, and powered-up... nothing; RRoD still smiling at me.

BTW the heatsink mod found on the net; didn't appeal to me because the alternative heatsink clamping method wouldn't put pressure in the centre, essentially allowing the PCB to flex and a gap to form between the top of the GPU and the H/S. The original x-spring clips have a centre "point" to prevent it. Also, the suggestion of running the GPU with no cooling or wrapping a towel around it or similar in order to heat the processor up enough to melt its own solder joints sounds like a sure-fire way to knacker it. If you don't kill it straight away, I'm sure you'd reduce its life.

I was deciding what to do with my dead Xbox, now that I couldn't save it. I was about to pack up the reflow gun, ready to take back to work, when I thought I might as well give it another go.

This time I left the H/S on and attempted to blow the hot air under the processor. I gave it a little bit of extra time, because of the H/S. I also thought I should do the CPU as well, it may not be (only) the GPU. Then I left it to cool.

Naked zombie Xbox on trial.

I dropped the drive back in, reconnected the leads and hit the power: the fans ramped to full power (the H/S were still very warm) and I was treated to the usual dance of green lights! As I type, it's been on for about 4 hours playing DVDs. The real test will be when I re-case it and hit it with a 9 hr gaming session!!!

Saturday 10 April 2010

The start of yet something else

Ok, so I created this "hub" as central place to upload info about what I'm working on, or planning to work on, that doesn't yet warrant its own blog. To explain; I'm already working on a functioning Sci-Fi model / VTOL UAV, I'm in the middle of animating a toy meerkat for work and I had to make some mods to my motorcycle helmet recently (links in the sidebar). On top of that I was given a 2 axis stepper driven linear table recently and thought it a great opportunity to look at creating my own CNC machine.


I can share info and photos here on the hub of stuff that may or may not go anywhere, and will link to my other stuff. Blogs are so much more convenient than my old website, that I had to use specific software, edit and upload via FTP, to use.

Anyway, enough rambling; I'm supposed to be doing my assignment :-/