Wednesday, June 10, 2015

Repairing a Velodyne V-Pulse

Disclaimer: This is NOT a tutorial. You mess up your repair following my experience, it's not my problem.

So, my co-worker's Velodyne Vpulse's join to the connector started to go wonky, and I was all "Hey! I could replace that with a new connector!"

Should not have done that >.<

The cables inside were *tiny*, and best of all, I was totally dumbfounded when I tried measuring the resistance and everything came back as open. Evidently, every single strand of wire appears to have some kind of insulation. Tinning them was a pain. I ended up buying the flame tip for my soldering iron to just melt off the insulation before the solder could bite.

In either case, after a good few hours, I got it working (whew!). As you can see from the cable above, there are lots of tiny bundles of wires, each probably like half a mm or so. Not. Fun. To. Work. With.

There are:
  • Red
  • Blue
  • Green
  • Twisted Blue/Copper
  • Copper strands
  • Two strands of thread
Also, as this headphone is for IOS, the cables seemingly required the following connections to the TRRS connector:

Tip: Blue
Ring 1: Green
Ring 2: Copper Strands + Twisted Blue/Copper
Sleeve: Red

From my tests, Blue/Green are the headphone outputs, and the copper strands their ground. Red with the twisted blue/Coppper are for the mic.

So glad I got this working, as it was a pain to deal with such tiny cables >.>

My Shure SE215s have appeared to hold up pretty well so far, and if their cables get damaged, I'm so glad they can be user replaced. At least when I recabled my grados, they were a rather straightforward.

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