Hardware Diagnostics (Was: A talent for repair)

[Scott Sullivan]

Dear List Members,

The story quoted below reminds me how unverifiable our computer hardware 
can be.
As such I wish to relay a story of my own experience and at the end 
propose a question.

I own an OLPC XO.

For awhile after I got it I was experiencing strange behaviour when 
using the keyboard. Wrong characters, the inability to use 
ctrl-sequences. Like the owner of the Toshiba from the other story I 
suspected that it might be a loose connection from the keyboard to the 
main board.

The OLPC XO was designed with serviceability in mind, so taking it apart 
was rather easy with only three types of screws used in the whole design 
(with spares located inside the casing!). But I found nothing to be a miss.

What eventually allowed me to track down the issue was the built in 
hardware diagnostics in the firmware (BIOS eqv.).

The OLPC XO boot firmware includes visual diagnostics for all of it's 
hardware components.
These include live trackpad data visualization, fish-eye generation on 
the USB ports (checkable with an ossiliscope) and most important in my 
case a live key press map.
With this diagnostic I was able to watch the keys as I pressed them and 
after playing with it for a bit I noticed the Ctrl key was sticking.

Now, this is not your normal keyboard in the OLPC XO, it's a fully 
sealed membrane. It is also rather silly how I repaired the problem by 
accidentally causing a rip in the membrane around the key.

But to put this story in to perspective, if I had not had that tool in 
the firmware, I would have never likely figured out the cause.

My question to the list is this,

     What would it take to get manufactures to making their products 
serviceable again?

(And I don't want to hear "Fat Chance" or "can't beat greed" answers, 
give the question a chance and come up with some constructive thoughts.)




On Sun, Jul 25, 2010 at 06:43:04PM -0400, phiscock-g851W1bGYuGnS0EtXVNi6w at public.gmane.org wrote:
>> We have an older Toshiba laptop that's been used by various members of the
>> family and eventually ended up being used by my wife Dorothy. A year ago,
>> the keyboard stopped working correctly, although the rest of the machine
>> was functional and we could use a USB keyboard instead. I took the machine
>> as far appart as I dared, looking for a bad connection - at one point I
>> had most of it spread out on my bench - but couldn't find anything wrong.
>>
>> Dorothy got tired of this and bought a Mac. We put the Tosh in the basement.
>>
>> Last week, Dorothy left for a vacation in Walton, NS, a former mining town
>> *away* out in rural Nova Scotia. On a whim, she took the Tosh with her to
>> show to a local woman who is self trained in fixing computers. Marg is
>> about 65 and 'started in computers' a few years ago. I was pretty
>> skeptical this was going anywhere.
>>
>> Dorothy showed the computer to Marg and she very quickly determined that a
>> couple of the function keys were pushed down and locked together. Using a
>> paper clip, she freed the keys and the keyboard worked fine.
>>
>> Some people, like Marg, have a real talent for repairing things. And it's
>> not necessarily those with an engineering degree ;).
>>      
-- 
Scott Sullivan
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