Repairing HP 8180 All-In-One printer

A friend of mine called me yesterday.

His HP Model C8180 Photosmart All-In-One Printer/Scanner/Copier  was faulty and rebooted all the time after switching it on. See this video with exactly the same fault.

It seems this was hit by crapy electrolytic capacitors (aka capacitor plague).
So I removed the logic board and saw the defect immediately.

3 caps were defect and the other one was suspect. Therefore I replaced all of them with better ones (one voltage level higher).

Parts: 

C614 and C662 (680uF at 6.3V, replace them with 680uF/10V)

C613 and C660 (330uF at 10V, replace them with 330uF/16V) 

Cost: Under $2. (Good chance that shipping cost will be higher than the parts cost)

Here are some pics:

Remove 2 screws on the right upper front

Remove 1 screw on the rear right. Afterwards, remove the 2 covers.

Now you see the logic board.

It might be a good idea to take some photos of the cabling now.
You need to remove 12 connectors.

Unscrew the logic board (4 screws) and take it out. 

There we have it. Look at the 4 capacitors.
If the vents are open or dried, they need to be replaced.

There we see that 3 are defect and one also does not look promising.
Unsolder all of them. Watch out the polarity of the new ones.
If you insert it the wrong way, you get a nice firecracker..
After you replaced them, reconnect the connectors and reinstall the board.
Then test your printer.

Good bye Eclipse, Hello Idea!

Used Eclipse since IBM contributed the first version in several flavors: First pure Eclipse, then MyEclipse and the last years SpringSource STS.
Projects went bigger and migrated from Ant to Maven to Gradle. The last projects were 100% Grails.

Grails development itself is great. Fast, nice and ... fast.
But Eclipse went worse and worse with every new revision released. Spring Plugin had to be disabled as working was impossible with it. Using Eclipse at the end was a pain.

Due to this, a few weeks ago I tried IntelliJ IDEA 11.
And what could I say? It is great. Fast, feature rich and supports things I didn't ever think about.

Small example: Resource bundles.
You see miss-spelled rb key names in all files using them. All files? Yes! Java, Groovy, JSF, JSP, etc.
You also see unused rb keys in the rb files!

Debugging is much better than in Eclipse. Javascript debugging is simply great.
Spring support? Bean validation, Spring Webflow charts, etc. work (I didn't notice and speed reduction while using it)

Groovy? Much better than current Eclipse plugin.
Gradle? Great as well! Including validation, which is missing in Eclipse.

Code completion works like a charm, even in Groovy and Gradle build files.

Eclipse is years behind.

Ok, it is not free of charge. Personal license is $199 and Commercial license start at $499.
This means for me, it will take only days until I got this amount back, as I'm so much faster in developing now.

Creating an Apple-Fusion like drive on your own

If you have a SSD drive, you can create your own Fusion like drive

See here: fusion-drive-on-older-macs