Neck Ache: Part 3

With the bottom cable all soldered up It's time to move on to the top half. Instead of soldering the top half, I gambled and decided to just replace the pins. The gamble was that even though they're the same size, the pins on the iMac's cable might pull out easily if the little plastic keepers don't go all the way back down.

So I just grabbed my handy x-acto knife and carefully pried the little keeper bits up the smallest amount possible to release the wires. Once I had them all out, I consulted my pinout (see bottom) and started plugging the iMac's wires in. Because of that pesky extra green wire, I stole the green wire from above and soldered it to the green cat 5 wire I ran so it would fit into the adapter.

It actually took me a really long time to get all those tiny little wires pushed into the plastic thingy. But I eventually got it.

Like i feared, many of these wires aren't really in there all that well and tend to want to slip out with relative ease. I'm not 100% sure how to remedy this issue. I thought about hot-gluing where the wires go in but I'm paranoid about melting any insolation or screwing anything up like that. For the time being, I just flattened out the wires and wrapped them in electrical tape.

Once the video cable was all finished, I moved on to the backlight wires. For these, I'm using the cables Apple allocated for the Inverter to run the two pairs of backlight wires. I started by cutting back the heat-shrink on the backlight power cables.

Incase you haven't noticed, I have a lot of... lets say, "special" moments. I get it into my head that I know what I'm doing and got it all figured out, and then, do something really stupid. Like cut off the the end of that video cable! grrr... Anyway, in this installment of "Dave's Super Special Moments", (most likely brought to you by leaded solder), instead of cutting off end so I have the connector part to solder onto the bottom, I just pulled off the plastic part as I've been doing and soldered the the plug ends right to the inverter cable, or rather, the cable that plugs into the inverter cable:

This is the cable that connected the original inverter to the inverter cable right behind the display.

Anyway, so that was dumb. Luckily, since I just happened to have some spare monitor parts lying around (weird, right?) so I was able to solder on the end from that:

So, that's it. Everything was ready for the big test. As of that moment, I was 50/50 with this monitor stuff working. After I got everything hooked up and turned the monitor on... it didn't work. Now at this point a familiar feeling of dread passed over me, but I was able to shake it off and go right into troubleshooting mode.

Symptoms: The backlights turned on for a second, then turned back off. The picture on the screen was present even after the backlights turned off and was very fuzzy.

Testing: I grabbed my multi-meter and began testing to make sure all the wires were still connected and no exposed wire bits were hitting any other wires. I did the continuity test on the inverter wires first, and they all checked out. I then moved onto the video cable.

I made sure each of the wires was where is was supposed to be based on my pinout. All good. Then I did a continuity test from the black connector that plugs into the video card to the plastic thingy (above) that plugs into the back of the LCD, making sure that there were no broken solder points. I also wanted to make sure there were no exposed wires touching other wires, so while I had one end of the multimeter on a wire in the black connector, I slid the other lead of the multimeter across all of the gold ends on the plastic thingy and made sure it only beeped when touching the right pin. A lengthy explanation for a lengthy process.

Anyway, after doing all this, I found that a single wire had managed to go and get broken.

That's right, that little bastard, RIGHT THERE, ruined my entire day! To add insult to injury, it was one of those hair-thin stupid wires that was a pain the butt to strip and solder the first time when it wasn't surrounded by a heaping glom of un-shrumk heat-shrink tubing. Yuck.

At this point I grabbed some cookie dough out of the refrigerator and called it a day. I REALY hope that is the culprit and I'll have the monitor fully functional by the end of the weekend. We'll see.

Oh, here's that pinout I promised:

I know it's messy, but it I understand it and that's all that really counts.