Deconstructing the Garmin Etrex Vista
After having opened up my iBook without thrashing it I felt brave and decided it was time to perform some work on my Garmin Etrex Vista handheld GPS.
The Vista is a nice unit and I quite like it (mainly for biking and hiking) but it must be said that Garmin's service and repair policy stinks. There is a default warranty of one year, and after the warranty has expired, you are charged a flat rate for any repair. The flat rate depends on the model and for the Vista it will set you back about $150. Right, that's half the price of a new unit.
Now I find over and over that reliability issues with electronic devices and gadgets usually appear about right after the expiration of the warranty period - and the Vista was a prime example of this. The problem that struck me, after about a year-and-a-half of use was the following: just like the other Etrex models, the Vista sports the 'click-stick', a small joystick that also can be clicked (as with a computer mouse) and that is indispensible to navigate the menus and maps. So one day, the 'north' direction on this click-stick stopped working; that had a couple of annoying consequences, for instance, the fact that I couldn't increase the contrast of the display any longer, or navigate, yes, north on maps any more. Some googling learned that problems with the click-stick are fairly typical. It seemed very likely that the problem was caused by some bad electrical contact and thus rather simple. No way I was going to pay $150 for this - shame on Garmin for not acting in a more customer-friendly way with a known issue like this - so the Vista was going in for surgery...
(procedure and pics in the extended post)
My partner-in-many-crimes Franz, who also has a Vista with a click-stick problem of his own (!), pointed me to this site, which, besides being a nice Garmin Etrex resource, shows how to open up the device.
First, remove the batteries; then, the rubber band that runs all around the Vista has to get off. It is glued to the unit with some rubber cement or epoxy; pry it off carefully, this isn't too hard, just very gooey. Underneath, some sticky transparent tape is revealed that seals off the seam between the two case halves. It has to go as well; the Vista now looks like this
and the sticky mess that you must have accumulated like this:
Now the two parts of the case have to be separated. They just latch into each other, so no screws are involved. It took me some time to get it open, you just have to exercise some patience and resist the temptation to apply brute force, as the latching tabs are all plastic and not looking too strong. The tab at the bottom part of the device was playing hard-to-get on me, but a lot of wiggling around did the job.
There is a ribbon connector connecting the upper half of the case (with the display) to a board in the lower half, so when the case halves separate, care has to be taken not to rip out this ribbon; once you feel the upper case half come off, gently rotate it 180 degrees and put it down.
The ribbon should be detached by carefully pressing on the plastic latches at the edges of the connector that keeps it attached to the board in the lower case half. When you're done, you should see this (no photo of the unit with the ribbon still connected as I didn't have extra hands available):
Here's a close-up of the flimsy ribbon connector - another typical problem with Vista's is the ribbon becoming loose, so keep this in mind when you reassemble it:
Two screws attach the board with the display and the click-stick to the upper case. Undoing these reveals the probable culprit:
The click-stick is essentially a spring-loaded bidirectional switch; crap build-up and contamination on the metal surfaces is propably causing a bad electrical contact so I figured to use some contact cleaner spray on it:
It 's also possible that the ribbon connector itself is responsible for a bad contact - the metal pads on the ribbon should be cleaned as well, and often times just the act of detaching it and then reconnecting it again may solve things. After giving the click-stick a good coat and cleaning off the excess, it was time to put things back together.
The tricky part turned out to be fixing the ribbon back to the connector in the lower case; this worked best by initially leaving the display board detached from the upper case, guiding the ribbon in the plastic connector and latching it; then, while carefully holding the board with the ribbon in the connector, the two screws fixing the display board to the upper case can be inserted - having three hands here would definitely ease things, but again, with some patience it will work.
(the photo shows the display board with the screws attached to the upper case, but it should preferably be detached of it while refitting the ribbon as it's close to impossible to close the latch otherwise)
The rest is easy: the two case halves can be simply pressed together; at this point I tested out the device and I found myself pleasantly surprised to see that everything was working again, including the click-stick, in all directions. So it was time to wrap up and I used electrical tape to seal the seams, then put a little bit of epoxy on the rubber band and put it back on... voila, the Vista was running like new again!
The Vista is a nice unit and I quite like it (mainly for biking and hiking) but it must be said that Garmin's service and repair policy stinks. There is a default warranty of one year, and after the warranty has expired, you are charged a flat rate for any repair. The flat rate depends on the model and for the Vista it will set you back about $150. Right, that's half the price of a new unit.
Now I find over and over that reliability issues with electronic devices and gadgets usually appear about right after the expiration of the warranty period - and the Vista was a prime example of this. The problem that struck me, after about a year-and-a-half of use was the following: just like the other Etrex models, the Vista sports the 'click-stick', a small joystick that also can be clicked (as with a computer mouse) and that is indispensible to navigate the menus and maps. So one day, the 'north' direction on this click-stick stopped working; that had a couple of annoying consequences, for instance, the fact that I couldn't increase the contrast of the display any longer, or navigate, yes, north on maps any more. Some googling learned that problems with the click-stick are fairly typical. It seemed very likely that the problem was caused by some bad electrical contact and thus rather simple. No way I was going to pay $150 for this - shame on Garmin for not acting in a more customer-friendly way with a known issue like this - so the Vista was going in for surgery...
(procedure and pics in the extended post)
My partner-in-many-crimes Franz, who also has a Vista with a click-stick problem of his own (!), pointed me to this site, which, besides being a nice Garmin Etrex resource, shows how to open up the device.
First, remove the batteries; then, the rubber band that runs all around the Vista has to get off. It is glued to the unit with some rubber cement or epoxy; pry it off carefully, this isn't too hard, just very gooey. Underneath, some sticky transparent tape is revealed that seals off the seam between the two case halves. It has to go as well; the Vista now looks like this
and the sticky mess that you must have accumulated like this:
Now the two parts of the case have to be separated. They just latch into each other, so no screws are involved. It took me some time to get it open, you just have to exercise some patience and resist the temptation to apply brute force, as the latching tabs are all plastic and not looking too strong. The tab at the bottom part of the device was playing hard-to-get on me, but a lot of wiggling around did the job.
There is a ribbon connector connecting the upper half of the case (with the display) to a board in the lower half, so when the case halves separate, care has to be taken not to rip out this ribbon; once you feel the upper case half come off, gently rotate it 180 degrees and put it down.
The ribbon should be detached by carefully pressing on the plastic latches at the edges of the connector that keeps it attached to the board in the lower case half. When you're done, you should see this (no photo of the unit with the ribbon still connected as I didn't have extra hands available):
Here's a close-up of the flimsy ribbon connector - another typical problem with Vista's is the ribbon becoming loose, so keep this in mind when you reassemble it:
Two screws attach the board with the display and the click-stick to the upper case. Undoing these reveals the probable culprit:
The click-stick is essentially a spring-loaded bidirectional switch; crap build-up and contamination on the metal surfaces is propably causing a bad electrical contact so I figured to use some contact cleaner spray on it:
It 's also possible that the ribbon connector itself is responsible for a bad contact - the metal pads on the ribbon should be cleaned as well, and often times just the act of detaching it and then reconnecting it again may solve things. After giving the click-stick a good coat and cleaning off the excess, it was time to put things back together.
The tricky part turned out to be fixing the ribbon back to the connector in the lower case; this worked best by initially leaving the display board detached from the upper case, guiding the ribbon in the plastic connector and latching it; then, while carefully holding the board with the ribbon in the connector, the two screws fixing the display board to the upper case can be inserted - having three hands here would definitely ease things, but again, with some patience it will work.
(the photo shows the display board with the screws attached to the upper case, but it should preferably be detached of it while refitting the ribbon as it's close to impossible to close the latch otherwise)
The rest is easy: the two case halves can be simply pressed together; at this point I tested out the device and I found myself pleasantly surprised to see that everything was working again, including the click-stick, in all directions. So it was time to wrap up and I used electrical tape to seal the seams, then put a little bit of epoxy on the rubber band and put it back on... voila, the Vista was running like new again!
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