Hard Resetting Your Ford Touch System The Easy Way

March 8, 2012 by Mike Nathan 28 Comments

ford-sync-reset

[Jeff Clymer] owns a Ford Focus, and while he’s generally happy with the car, the “My Ford Touch/Sync” system can be buggy at times. He spends a lot of time in the car each day, so when the entertainment center locks up as it is frequently known to do, he has to turn off the car and pull a fuse to reset the system. Since pulling a fuse while on the road is pretty impractical, he decided to install a reset button, making system reboots a breeze.

He started by disassembling various fuses until he found one with an easy to remove fusible link. Once it was in pieces, he soldered a pair of wires to the fuse terminals and connected everything to a normally closed momentary pushbutton switch. After adding an inline fuse holder and reinserting the original fuse, he installed the button into the back of his glove box

Now instead of physically removing the fuse each time his stereo locks up, he can simply push a button and be on his way. Here’s hoping a software fix is coming for [Jeff’s] car sooner rather than later!

Transformer-based PSU Repair

September 13, 2011 by Mike Szczys 19 Comments

Repairing someone else’s design mistakes is much more difficult than starting from scratch. So whenever we come across someone who’s good at this type of trouble-shooting we pay attention. [Jim] had a Sangean HDR-1 in his home. It’s a tabletop HD radio that stopped powering up for some reason. He cracked it open and got to the bottom of the problem.

The first order of business is disassembly, which isn’t too hard with this model. With multimeter in hand he started probing the transformer and found that the contacts for the primary are an open circuit; signaling a problem. There’s no inline fuse for protection, and further study of the secondary winding let him to discover the use of 1N5817 diodes. These are underrated parts for this particular transformer. He replaced them with 1N4003 diodes to bring the device in spec. But there was still the issue of fuse protections. A bit of circuit free-forming allowed him add a fuse and varistor by soldering the directly to the transformer’s contacts.

Why stop there? While [Jim] had the case open he also swapped out the low-end op-amp and a few electrolytic capacitors to improve the sound quality of the radio. Op-amp replacement seems to be a popular way to improve the sound from HD radios.