[A4] Re: display issues

[Robert A. King]

At 10:31 PM 7/2/2004, Mike Rollins wrote:
>Wow, that sucks.  You'd think Audi would have the IC down by now.  Hmm,
>maybe if Audi would pay a group of people to fix things like this instead of
>paying them to do noise analysis, there'd be even more happy Audi owners out
>there. :(
>
>On my way home, I could barely make out that it was 73 degrees, and God only
>knows what kind of mileage I'm getting.  I certainly couldn't make it out.
>
>Brian, if you can send me the pics via e-mail, I can host them and post a
>link to them.

About a year ago, I pulled my cluster and disassembled it.  All the 
electronic displays on the cluster (the information display, date/time and 
odometer,) use the same technology.

What's different with the information display is that it's MUCH larger with 
a larger number of picture elements.  The information display uses a 
rectangular grid of pixels where the other displays used individual 
segments to form the characters -- like a calculator or LCD watch.  This 
means there is many, many more things to control on the information display.

The displays are driven via ribbon cables that are integral to the display 
and soldered to the cluster's PCB.  Because there's so many picture 
elements in the info display, it's ribbon cable is very, very large.

I SUSPECT that VDO (who made my cluster,) is having problems soldering the 
large ribbon cable to the PCB.  It sure looks like the soldered contacts 
are flaky and thermal expansion is opening and closing the connections 
semi-randomly.  Perhaps someone who's skilled in soldering very small, 
high-density components could repair this.