[unitron]

I would buy a new power supply from Weaknees, but I have the skills required to just buy the $10 in parts and fix it myself.

I did get low ESR parts that surpass the ESR and ripple specs on the original.

When it comes to Capxon, I think even the stuff in Radio Shack's junk drawers outspecs them.

 

[unitron]

Well, after several years of having problems with my S3 it has finally died. Just this morning actually.

I opened up the case again and noticed that the large capacitor on the power board is rusting. Something is leaking out of that thing.

Unfortunately I do not have the skills or tools to replace just the capacitor so it looks like I'm stuck replacing the entire power board.

Thanks,
RM

If you feel comfortable removing the power supply, and want to pay shipping/mailing both ways (and a few bucks for the replacement capactitor(s), I can unsolder the bad ones and solder in good replacements, no charge for labor.

However, I don't have an S3 in which to test it, and can't absolutely guarantee that the capacitor(s) are the only thing wrong with it.

Mailing an entire TiVo runs about $20 one way. Not sure what sending just the power supply would run.

 

[unitron]

An $8 soldering iron and a $5 roll of solder from Radio Shack are all the tools required. While the Tivo motherboard is a multilayer board using surface mount components, the power supply is just a single layer board with axial lead components. Re-working an SMD multilayer board requires some skill and a steady hand. I don't recommend it for someone who is not already handy with a soldering iron. A low-frequency single layer board however, is much easier to wrangle. Just be sure to keep the tip of the iron clean, heat the joint, and add the solder to the joint, not the iron, and you should be fine. A bit of solderwick or a solder sucker can help with de-soldering, but honestly with large capacitors it's really not necessary.

Of course, it's up to you, but frankly, I can't imagine shying away from a soldering job this simple. Honestly, this is nothing I would have hestitated to tackle when I was 12 years old.

You left out the part about these particular electrolytics being polarity sensitive (as are probably 99.99% of electrolytics), and to take careful note of how the old ones are hooked up so as to not put the new ones in "backwards".

 

[unitron]

As a lurker, I just wanted to say thank you to everyone here for their input and advice. I have a Series 3 that was having reboot issues and I ended up replacing the hard drive and a bulging capacitor. Bought several 2200uF 25V 105C caps from Mouser and got it installed on the first try. I know that I would not have noticed the bulge without the info in this post and others, and I am pretty sure I would not have attempted it myself without the same (no real soldering experience).

Thanks again.

Now you can start trolling Craigslist for other dead TiVos and use up the rest of those caps.

 

[unitron]

looking for some confirmation and a hand finding replacements.

my S3 died last night-seems to be power supply- at first it was stuck in reboot loop of welcome power up then blank screen, lather rinse repeat.

I unplugged it and went to bed. Looked at it to day with the cover off and when i plug it in a get nothing but a clicking from the power supply- not the drvie click of death (had a dozen or so tivo's over 12 or so years so know that sound well sadly).

When I look at it from the front on the right of the tall black heatsink is a tall skinny cap that is bulging- (C701 on the board) marked 2200uf 25v (another post says that cluster of tall ones is the usual culprit). But also just to the left of that black heat sink are 2 shorter caps also marked 2200uf but 6.3v (C401 and the one next to it)

I assume i just need to change these 3 caps.

But only really every built from kits so no idea how to spec things.

some other posts say I should be looking for low ESR types and others said be sure to get 105 degrees

so i picked out these from amazon:
4 pack panasoinc low ESR 105 degree radial 2200uf 25v

and this:
8pack rubycon low ESR 105 degrees radial leads 2200uf 6.3v

those cut the mustard?

thanks
Mike

Sometimes 2 capacitors with the same specs will differ in size and shape, one being taller and skinnier, the other shorter and wider.

As long as these aren't too wide or, if under a heat sink that "arches" over, like on S2 supplies, too tall, those choices should work fine.

Those are two of the better regarded brands.

The prices are a little on the high side, but not terribly.

$5 for shipping is a bit much, especially if they aren't going to combine it into one order and only charge the $5 once.

And you'll have plenty of leftovers.

Make sure to observe polarity, one lead's marked with negative signs (which makes the other one the positive by default). Observe which way the ones you unsolder and remove are turned and put the new ones in the same way.

 

[unitron]

thanks for confirming-

i checked the physical measurements and they were in the ballpark of what's on the board now (I noticed some others i saw were way off and thought the specs might be different so avoided them). (and the black heatsink on the S3 power supply DOES arch over the 6.5 volt ones )

I actually like that there's 4 times as many of each that i need- i have a second S3 of the same vintage so figure it's only time before that one craps out. So I really need 2 sets and this way i can screw up twice in the process- ;-) (haven't always had the best luck futzing with my tivo's- many years back i "Donated" an early directivo to the the folks at DDB when they needed one to figure out something for the topic that shall not be mentioned. I had somehow futzed the PROM trying to reprogram it.So it was worthless to me but not an issue for those guys....)

the shipping was a bit annoying but figured it was simpler to use my amazon account rather then opening yet another one someplace else.

thanks again
Mike

If you've got experience unsoldering, programming, and resoldering a PROM, this should be a piece of cake for you. Good luck.

 

[unitron]

nah, wish i could do surface mount but a little over my head- that's why i donated it- lol.

Back on the series1 directivo's you could just reprogram the prom on the board. (in fact the prom came at the very beginning set up without the programming on the drive even being encrypted, then tivo/directv sent down an update to encrypt the drive contents. There were tools to reprogram it yourself- and I tried them but i futzed it somehow. So I donated it to the guys working on other tools since they were ableto unsolder, reprogram and socket.

Years and years ago some things from kits or plans and soldered myself so i can handle this (I can recall the first thing I built was a ring detector for a modem for an atari 400 computer, in fact i think it was basically some caps and a relay on a bread board from the rat shack) . So while surface mount is over my head something with leads is not a problem.

You'll be okay.

Just don't use acid-core plumber's solder.

 

[unitron]

Hi Unitron, I'm trying to extend the life of my beloved Series 3. Does your offer to replace bad caps still stand? If so, please let me know what I need to do to get started!

If you want to pay postage both ways, I can replace the caps.

If that's your problem.

I don't have an S3 in which to test it when I'm done though, so I won't know if what I did fixed it or not.

What are your symptoms?

Have you had the top off and looked at the power supply and everything else yet or not?

 

[unitron]

I have a refurbished TCD652160 (DVR826D) that I activated 8/25/2009. It is freezing during playback, generally when I skip 30 sec, and has rebooted once. My assumtion was that the drive is going, but do those symtoms align at all with bad caps? Is there anything I can do to actually verify that the drive is going bad? I'm going to replace it with a 1 TB. I guess I should pop it open and check for the Capxcon power supply capacitors before I take it down for the disk change. Any comments or advice would be appreciated. Anything else I should do while it is open?

You'll need a #10 Torx driver to take the top off. It'll probably be enough to remove the drive bracket as well, if you need to take the drive off of the bracket there's a small chance of needing a #15, but most likely the #10 will work.

Assuming they refurbed with the same 160GB WD drive that comes stock, get the .iso image for the bootable cd with the WD diagnostic software, burn yourself a copy, run the short test and then run the long test.

While that's going on, read this

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague

and then look at the picture here (all mad props to steve614)

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=479176

to see how subtle the difference is, and then carefully examine the power supply.

It is possible to have power supply problems without being able to visually detect anything wrong with the capacitors, but most of the time there will be some indication.

Do you have any experience using a voltmeter?

What brand and model 1TB are you planning on using?

 

[unitron]

<What brand and model 1TB are you planning on using? >

WD10EADS-65M2B0. Its in a computer now and seems to increment its idle count every 5 min. So hopefully I wont need wdidle3. I'm having trouble booting wdidle3 on my x64 system.

I do hardware design for a living, so none of this is tough in that regard. Just getting all my ducks in a row before starting.

The symptoms I'm having are strange. I get long pauses. Yesterday it recorded the Daily Show and then said there was no signal when I tried to play it. It recorded another show at the same time and it played fine. I looked at cable signal strength and it was 100. I re-seated all the rf connectors anyway. Maybe it is reacting to some weird Comcast issues? I want to up the drive anyway, so this is a good excuse to get it done.

That should be a good TiVo drive. I'm running the 2TB version in an S3 HD with no problems and several others in computers.

Go ahead and get a friend to let you use their computer for a few minutes to disable Intellipark and eliminate a possible problem.

The TiVo keeps the drive busy all the time, so Intellipark will never kick in. Until the TiVo needs to do a soft reboot, which will give the drive enough "no signal" time to park the heads which means when the TiVo gets far enough in the boot process to call on the drive it will be asleep, which means the TiVo will reboot and try again, which means the drive will still be asleep, lather, rinse, repeat.

And don't bother going to the bigger drive until you're sure the power supply is okay.

And go ahead and run the WD diagnostics on the original drive.

If it passes the long test, you know you have to look elsewhere for the problem.

 

[unitron]

When did you purchase your S3s? Reason I ask, I'm looking to buy a used S3 and was hoping to avoid any bad caps if possible. But of course I'm not sure if Tivo switched cap suppliers upon learning of them being defective.

TiVo doesn't have capacitor suppliers.

TiVo has subcontractors who have sub-subcontractors who have distributors who have capacitor suppliers.

As far as I know there's no reliable database of which models built when do or don't have capacitors that might go bad.

The good news is under $10 in parts and a little soldering and you're back in business.

 

[unitron]

I happened to purchase both my S3's in the fall of 2006. Right around when they came out if i recall. (one the first week, the other ~ month later)

BUT...

I'm under the impression that all the S3's where built during the period when these bad cap's where widely installed (as no one knew until some time later there was a problem).

The S3's themselves got replaced by the TivoHD's around a year later if i recall. so they weren't built over a very long period of time.

So If you are buying a used S3 i think it's a crapshoot. Either be prepared to spend $5-10 yourself and use a soldering iron or budget to spend $100 for the weakness replacement. Maybe you get lucky and it never happens but it seems like a significant percentage will eventually have the problem. (By significant I mean some percentage more than "normal" but certainly not a majority or anything like that)

The capacitor problem in general was already well known by the time the original S3 came on the market (by that time I and thousands of others had BX chipset Pentium II/III boards fail, and S2 TiVos and DirecTivos had already had problems, and that was about the time my mom's computer's power supply went BANG--a small cap didn't bulge, it exploded), but there were millions and millions of the bad caps in the supply chains along with good ones by then.

The S3 HDs are also vulnerable to this problem, that's how I happened to be able to get mine for free, because the power supply was bad.

Did I mention that the LCD monitor I'm using right now was left on the curb down the street for the garbage truck and I happened to see it first (and lcdalternatives had a cap kit for it)?

 

[unitron]

interesting- didn't realize it was so long of a period when the mess was ongoing.

Almost 15 years now.

 

[unitron]

Does anyone have the quantities and dimensions on these for an original S3?

Scott

The ones most likely to be bad are on the +12V (yellow wire) or +5V (red wire) outputs (+ lead connected to that, - lead connected to ground--black wire), and likely 2200uF at 16 to 25V, and I read of one person who had a bad 3300uf.

The thing to do is open it up and inspect visually, (and checking the orange, red, and yellow wires with a DC voltmeter on the 20 or 25 volt scale is a good idea as well, look for the orange to be in the neighborhood of +3.3V) and get the specs off of the caps themselves, and remember, when buying replacements of the same capacitance in microFarads and the same voltage rating (which should always be at least the next step up from the voltage of the circuit, but not more than 2 or 3 steps up), also be sure to get ones rated for 105 degrees Celsius and low ESR (Equivalent Series Resistance).

 

[unitron]

Does anyone have the quantities and dimensions on these for an original S3?

Scott

And another thing, I've seen a picture of an S3 HD power supply which looked very much like the picture of the OLED S3 supply (except for that extra wire that powers the OLED), and that picture looked different from the supply in my HD, so there may be more than one version of the supply for the 648, so there's no substitution for raising the hood and looking for yourself.

 

[unitron]

Hey Guys,

I have been posting in some other threads about my series 3 OLED. I checked out the power supply and its only reading about 7.5 volts so it looks like this is where the problem is.

On visual inspection there does not appear to be any bulging caps (I have seen the pic floating around here). Anybody have any clue which caps are the 12 volt ones? Is there a schematic around anywhere?

My suspicions were correct and I had a power supply starting to fail in one of my 2 S3 OLED (faint wavy lines in video). It finally decided to go into a reboot cycle on Thursday. I opened it up yesterday and found the2 2200uF 6.3V caps (C401/C402) bulging. To verify the power supply was the issue, I swapped in the power supply from my other S3 and it resolved the boot issue and the wavy lines. Interestingly, that one also had 1 bulging capacitor which was the 2200uF 25V cap (C701).

I'm putting together my order today and had planned on replacing all of the 2200uF and 3300uF caps in both power supplies (8 each) as I've seen other cases here of many of those having issues, but thought I would check here to see if there were any opinions on replacing the remaining capacitors (7 each) especially since most if not all seem to have been made by Capxcon.

Scott

The yellow wires are connected to the +12 Volt output, the red wires to the +5 Volt output, and the black wires to the power supply's "ground".

All of the capacitors each have 2 wires coming out of the bottom. These are called leads, as in lead a horse to water, not as in lead pipe cinch.

If you are capable of it, remove the power supply board from the TiVo and look at the bottom.

You'll see an area of copper where the yellow wires stick through from the top, a different area where the red wires stick through from the top, and a different different area where the black wires stick through from the top.

If you look at where else those copper areas, called lands, extend to, you'll find where one or two capacitors have one of their leads sticking through the +12V land and the other sticking through the ground land.

This is called being "across" the 12V line, or output.

The same technique will reveal one or more capacitors "across" the 5V line.

There are other capacitors, or "caps", on the power supply board, which are part of other circuits, which are probably fine.

It seems, so far, to be just the caps which have one lead grounded and the other lead connected to either the 12V or 5V output which have developed problems.

As for replacing caps because of what brand they are, CapXon is widely known as CrapXon, but the Series 2 Dual Tuner power supply uses them and I haven't heard of any of that particular model having problems so far, so brand alone is only a possible indicator.

Also, counterfeit versions of reputable brands are being produced.

 

[unitron]

I'll ignore the rest since you were replying to 2 posts and the rest appeared to be directed to Dan.

I think that I'll ignore the smaller higher voltage caps and the very large 200V one near the inputs and only replace the ones I'd already indicated except I'll add the 2 470uF and the 1 1000uF ones to to the list.

Regarding counterfeits, you would hope that 3Y would be purchasing directly from the vendor.

Scott

Who or what is 3Y?

 

[unitron]

Thanks Scott. I just happened to be doing this same thing right now and figured I'd search and see if anyone already did, though I was already in process so I did it more for sanity check. Here's some updates for you: You listed 401 twice - the one next to it is 402. and 50? is 503. And where you listed 503 is really 504. At least this is how it is on my Rev A2 board.

I also added what I observed by tracing the routes, but not actually checking voltages, so these comments could be off

C220 47uF 50V primary side of transformer
C227 10uF 25V primary side of transformer

C120 470uF 200V primary side of transformer

C601 2200uf 16V 7.5V (pre-inductor)
C701 2200uF 25V 12V (pre-inductor)
C502 3300uF 10V 5V (pre-inductor) [C502, C501 & C504 in parallel]
C501 3300uF 10V 5V (pre-inductor) [C502, C501 & C504 in parallel]
C504 3300uF 10V 5V (pre-inductor) [C502, C501 & C504 in parallel]

C401 2200uF 6.3V seems to be on 3.3V line
C402 2200uF 6.3V seems to be on 3.3V line

C306 2.2uF 50V secondary side amongst signals

C503 3300uF 10V Red 5V Output
C403 1000uF 6.3V Orange 3.3V Output
C603 470uF 16V Grey 7.5V Output
C702 470uF 16V Yellow 12V Output

From what I've seen so far, the ones that go bad are actually post-inductor, that is, assuming for the sake of illustration a current flow from positive to ground, current flows from the transformer secondary through the big coil to the other end of the coil which is soldered to a point which connects to the red or the yellow wire and to the + terminal of the bad cap(s) with the - terminal connected to the same place all the black wires are, which is to say, ground.

Assuming that current flows from positive to negative is known as conventional current theory, and still gets used a lot, especially in analyzing negative ground systems.

It is that view of current flow I'm using to say post-inductor.

Electron current theory says that the flow of current is actually the flow of electrons, and it goes from negative to positive.

 

[unitron]

Outstanding work, my good man!! I just got mine running. I ordered your entire list (parts are too cheap as compared to shipping, best to have everything!)

First I replaced only the bulging caps. Plugged in power supply. Still goes tick tick tick, and 12v line is at 6-7 volts. Replaced more caps. Test again...same results. Replaced all the rest of them. Test again. Tick tick tick...damn.

Scratch head, and wonder if PSU needs a load against it to run. I was leery of testing this way, I didn't want to fry the mobo if I'd wrecked the PSU unit, but I was out of options.

Hooked up the hard drive and motherboard, and it powered up to the sunrise screen!! Now to get a good image on that hard drive, and my "for parts/as-is" lifetime ebay bargain tivo will be ready to go!

For future reference, either the PROPER motherboard OR a hard drive should be sufficient load to momentarily test a TiVo's switch-mode power supply.

 

[unitron]

Is there any reason to replace the white adhesive that was on the caps?

I used small dabs of hot glue, because it gives a little support, but can be peeled back off later if I need it to. Since I replaced all the caps in that area with the good ones from digikey, I don't anticipate getting back into that area of the PSU again.

More to hold them in place for soldering and shipping than anything else, so I wouldn't worry about it.