Left nub broken??

[Antbass]

Hey everyone, go myself a second hand pandora from eBay, every now and then the left nub seemed slow but now it's going crazy, drifting all over the place and the actual nub doesn't seem to centre when you move it.


Tried resetting them etc, seems like they're buggered, any way to get this fixed?


Cheers team!


Ant

 

[lomaxx]

Of course I can't really tell you what causes your nub to malfunction, but here's my experience with nubs:


I own one of the early Pandoras which are known to have flawed nubs, which do not last that long. After some times during which I didn't use the nubs that much, things got so worse that i had the same issues like you. Out of some explorer-mood I decided to try to change the nubs on my own. Two of the new nub-generation. Exchanging them was not that easy and due to my low experience with stuff like this, I damaged my board a little. I can't really recommend to try changing them on your own unless you have quite some soldering-experience and/or can stand losses.


Still I managed to get the new nubs working. And they worked fine. Now after some time, I am having the same problems again. Again without using the nubs that much. Most of the time I use shortkeys or synergy/ssh (an external keyboard) to control xfce. I have the slight feeling that the soldering contacts are not perfect, as I opened the Pandora again and applied some heat to the spots. And for a day or two things were better. Not sure if this was due to resoldering or a coincidence, but it didn't last long.


So today I will try to fix stuff again. We'll see with what result.


In short: Not sure if your nubs or the soldering spots (unlikely) are bugging you, but in any case I recommend to let someone fix it who knows what he is doing.

 

[Link]

Before you break out the soldering iron, try removing the battery for 20 minutes, replace the battery and power up the Pandora. Hopefully your nubs are fully reset and OK.

 

[lomaxx]

Yeah. Let me repeat: soldering is somewhat risky. Your might damage your board beyond ANY nub-usage or even total destruction of the Pandora.


I came here to give a quick update when Link's reply popped in Some moments ago I re-soldered the nubs - as in: I put the hot solder-tip on the lead that was already applied to the nub+board-soldering-spots (sorry for the poor description, but I am neither an native English-speaker, nor an expert to soldering) until the lead got fluid again and could 'spread' a bit more with the goal to re-establish the connection.


Afterwards I put everything together again. The Pandora still booted. Hooray! (I always find this a bit thrilling) and gave Super Geometry Dust a try, which is perfect for testing the nubs. Everything worked perfectly for now. I even managed to set my personal high-score of 728318 points. Which maybe is not good, but I'm not playing it a lot.


Maybe it also helped that the battery was taken out for several minutes. Who knows.

 

[lomaxx]

Another update: Right after writing the above, I tried again. The right nub is bugging me once again. I don't get a pattern. Maybe the nub is damaged itself and sometimes (not) working because some material is moving inside. I want to stress that I am not using brute force while playing, but trying to be as gentle as i can.

 

[Antbass]

I'm not sure taking out the battery would help? Definitely seems like a hardware issue, I'll try when I'm home though,


It seems to be physical damage because if you push the nub to the right it will stay there whereas the right nub springs back to the central position.

 

[Prometheus]

It seems to be physical damage because if you push the nub to the right it will stay there whereas the right nub springs back to the central position.

That sounds like Lethal Nub Death, all right. That's what the original nubs did when they failed.


Your best bet at this point would be to contact EvilDragon on this forum - he's one of the team, is the guy who's getting production moved to Germany, and he also deals with repairs. He has stated here that he has no problems with replacing the nubs and internal LCD cables on older units, even if the warranty has expired, because on the older units these were common points of failure.

 

[kuru]

I'm not sure taking out the battery would help?

It does work for me on occasion. Just found that out recently and it stumped me, because my right nub had never been working properly from the very beginning. It had a permanent upwards movement, I couldn't steer down/use double click feature. The left nub got worse over time and has a hard time going in a certain direction, too.


After I had replaced my LCD cable and, in the process, reconnected the battery, I noticed that the right nub's doubleclick function was working, the autonomous movement was gone! Before long everything returned to "normal" though.


How much are two new nubs? I might try and solder'em myself.