Are you sure it is the super capacitor leaking? There was nothing wrong with my 9200T super capacitor but the clock board had a layer of contamination on it. Biggles who did the most thorough investigation on this problem using professional test equipment, concluded that it was likely to be a manufacturing issue leaving contaminant on the surface of the board.The '9200's Achilles' heel is/was the RTC backup supercapacitor which leaked all over the crystal's connections.
The hard drives have a design life of about 100,000 power on hours but a fair number do fail earlier than that. I would guess that an average main board and power supply will last at least 10 years but the word 'average' does mean that some will fail sooner. There is a steady trickle of reports that sound as though they are component failures on the main board.Does anyone here know anything about the expected lifetime of the various components in an HDR FOX T2, assuming it is not exposed to any extreme conditions? (hard drive, circuit board, chips, capacitors, PSU, fan etc)
You can manage without the VFD.
The main issue is with the tuners, the major semiconductors, and the electrically-alterable non-volatile memory (including configuration inside the system chip). Typically, the guaranteed data retention time is 10 years, and if the memory loss occurs somewhere we can't refresh, or disables the firmware update functionality, we're stuffed.
Oh yes, quite sure. Leakage was well-known issue with these small ones round the time the '9200 was made.Are you sure it is the super capacitor leaking?
Unless you'd done a rundown test against a known good one you'd not know how low a value of 'nothing wrong' you had.There was nothing wrong with my 9200T super capacitor but the clock board had a layer of contamination on it.
Only if you have taken the precaution of making sure that all of your recordings have been decrypted, else, no chance.If/when all HDR-FOX T2s stop functioning, can you thank of an alternative way of backing up Freeview HD recordings on another device (produced by Humax or another company) which will work then?
More likely it's going to be broken by some future change in Freeview.PS. It ain't going to suddenly fail at the 10 year point.
Vacuum Fluorescent Display - the display on the front panelWhat is the VFD?
Data retention in EEPROMs and like memory is temperature-dependent - the higher the temp the shorter it's guaranteed to be retained. All the more reason for running stuff cool....sounds like an HDR-FOX T2 can irreparably stop functioning 10 years after being manufactured, even if it is unplugged from the power and kept in storage all this time. Is this correct?
Oh yes, quite sure. Leakage was well-known issue with these small ones round the time the '9200 was made.
The supercap on the display board is directly above the 32kHz RTC crystal so any leakage has to travel only a very small distance before it gets to the leads of the xtal, where, it being ionic and high value bias resistors used around the xtal, it stops the RTC oscillator. A quick look at the '8563 RTC datasheet doesn't give the internal bias resistor values around the oscillator but in discrete oscillators like this >1M0 is used so it doesn't take much to kill it.
And having leaked it then dries, leaving only surface contamination and a supercap that has lost a lot of its capacitance, hence:
Unless you'd done a rundown test against a known good one you'd not know how low a value of 'nothing wrong' you had.
I did three. My own one and a neighbour's were caught and fixed at the point where the "--:--" display appeared. The third had had been left until long after this and the leakage had had enough time to etch off a couple of tracks - I've just had a look through my 'For the record' pix but it looks like I didn't take any.
[Edited correct rubbish I swear wasn't there before I posted.]
Look it up: Glossary (click)What is the VFD?
Electronics systems can suffer from a wide variety of random component or assembly failures, which may or may not have been intrinsic in their manufacture. We talk about a "bathtub curve" of failure probability over time - there is a (relatively) high rate of failure in early life, which get weeded out in manufacturing test or (these days) as customer exchanges in store (manufacturers save money on product testing by letting the consumer do it). Once the early failures are weeded out, there is a long period of low probability of failure (the floor of the bath) until failures due to old age kick in with a gradual upward slope to the curve.From what you have said here, it sounds like an HDR-FOX T2 can irreparably stop functioning 10 years after being manufactured, even if it is unplugged from the power and kept in storage all this time. Is this correct?
Why would you want to? FFS it's only telly. Stop squirrelling, or you will end up with a house full of hard drives and 100% of your day taken up refreshing the data before it degrades on the disk.If/when all HDR-FOX T2s stop functioning, can you thank of an alternative way of backing up Freeview HD recordings on another device (produced by Humax or another company) which will work then?
It's possible. The problem may have been not enough headroom in the can for expansion so once some electrolyte had been vented the leakage stopped. If the PCB has been laid out differently the leakage may had gone completely unnoticed.That's very interesting. I wonder why my two year old 9200 board, which was the second one successfully cleaned by Biggles, is still working 8 years later. Perhaps the supercap stopped leaking?
Just had a look. RTC working fine but the supercap is, or had been, leaking. This was one of the very last last Humax "Manager's specials", bought in 2010, and makes it four out of four machines with leaking supercaps....another neighbour had one that I wasn't asked to fix - I'll find out what happened to it.