Category: Rant

Yes, of course, I am talking about an Apple Time Capsule, which, as we all know, are a little too prone to expiring a little young. Well, I am an owner of one of these afflicted devices, the downside is that I used it both as a backup device, and as a wireless access point, so, in one go, I’ve lost two useful devices. Well, as my alter ego MacGyver has a knack of resurrecting dead hardware and technology, I figured I would try some to work some Lazarus style resurrection on my Time Capsule. There are a number of sites on the Internet that deal with the results of the failure, and have a number of different ways of resurrecting the device, from the sensible, to the frankly insane (external wall-wart with a butchered power socket). After a bit of research I have found that two sites give a broadly similar method of repair,  that of Chris Fackrell, and Lapastenague, and therefore embarked on my journey. First off, when I came to dismantling the TC, I admit I was a little impatient, primarily because I was rather annoyed about the device failing, and therefore I wasn’t taking as much care as I possible could have done, and during the process of removing the rubber foot on the device, I tore the rubber 🙁   Overall this doesn’t make a huge difference in the finished repaired article, but, it’s just a known annoyance from my perspective, I will live with it.

So, rubber foot removed, and screws pulled out from the bottom, and everything now nicely exposed, I got to what everyone was saying was the root cause – a fried power supply. They were right. I had fried capacitors on the PSU module. JOY. It’s not the first time I have had a device with fried capacitors, if anyone does a Google search for “capacitor plague” then you will find out the extent of the problem in recent years, and some potential theories on the root cause. Frankly, I don’t give a hoot about the precise root cause, unless it’s exacerbated by some pretty piss-poor design, and in the case of the Apple TC, that is precisely what we have. The TC is a device that has 3 modules, a PSU, a hard drive, and a system board, and all three modules generate heat by due nature of having electricity running through them.

The hard drive, in my case, a Western Digital Black Series, is designed for high performance devices, with barely a secondary care for heat generation. It’s the sort of hard drive designed for those people that like to have oversized desktop cases with lots of colourful fans inside to keep the PC inside cool. (Hey – I was one of that crowd at one point in my life – so I won’t knock ’em) Let’s put it another way, the drive definitely isn’t a Western Digital Green Series, designed for low power and low heat generation, the kind of drive required for such a little device such as the Apple TC. Another issue, where is the cooling for the TC ? Apple, in their infinite wisdom included  a fan inside the TC, but there are a couple of serious flaws with that in itself.

Firstly, and I would say, foremost, a fan is designed to move air around – but in the case of the TC, where is it going to get air from ? No-where, the aforementioned rubber foot on the device covers all the holes in the bottom of the case, and, the holes in the bottom of the case are so few and far between (and so small) that the are essentially a decorative option in the aluminium panel at best (if the foot wasn’t covering them!).

The second problem – it “blows” air directly at the hard drive – the side of the hard drive, at the end furthest away from the power connectors – and there is, at best, a 2mm gap between the fan and the hard drive – so no where for the “air” to go to go over the surface of the hard drive, which would make the fan somewhat more useful.

And thirdly – I’ve never heard the fan come on…….. ….ever…. *UNTIL* I pulled the cable off the heat sensor that is attached to the hard drive, then the TC sounds like a muffled jet as the fan comes on at full chat, and the lovely green LED on the front goes orange, and the TC warns you via AirPort utility that the TC might be overheating. (more about that later – at the moment, I have a dead TC) Bollocks, and definitely no dogs involved. So, what am I going to do to get this thing working again ?

Well, following some of Chris Fackrell’s instructions, I start to look at getting the casing off the PSU module, whereupon, the thin black plastic takes on the structural consistency of a Cadbury’s flake, so getting something resembling a secure and safe “casing” to the PSU module back together post repair was nigh-on impossible, and unlike Chris, I didn’t fancy hand cutting some special sheeting to fit around the module.

So – I took a chance, a quick scoot round a famous auction site (yes, ok then, eBay), I found  a TC PSU in USA, so quickly entered my PayPal details, and somewhere around the 2 week mark, I had a nice little package waiting for my when I got home from work. First thing I did, was to assemble the PSU module in the TC, and fire the thing up without the case on (carefully – as there is a small risk of zapping oneself on mains level voltage if one is unduly careless) – and as this had passed the “not blow up and spit lots of broken electrics and magic smoke all over the place” test, I went the step further, loosely put the case back on, and plugged in an ethernet cable, and fired up my MacBook to see if everything could see each other, and, thankfully they could – at least the motherboard in the TC worked, and I could, at least in theory now, pull any data off the hard drive. Next step, well, as the TC is a flawed design, heat-wise, I started to look at what I could do to alleviate this issue, and both Christ Fackrell and LaPastenague have some fairly detailed method for solving this, I thought that I would have a go at engineering a longer term “fix”.

So, both agree that the fan is useless, so, lets fix that first, well, we do have to start somewhere  – right ? and at least lets start with something that will help prolong the replacement PSU’s life. I engineered a hole, 40mm (ish) in the bottom of the aluminium plate that forms the bottom of the case on the TC. I didn’t drill this with the rubber foot attached, I didn’t know exactly what the big drill bit would do to the rubber itself, didn’t fancy the teeth catching the rubber and ripping it to shreds, and leaving me with a completely destroyed rubber foot – I’d take it with a tear, as honestly, one can’t see it, when the system is in operation, it is on the underside after all – and only I will know it’s there 🙂

Now, in line with Chris’ details, and LaPastenague’s photo’s regarding the fan holes, they have quite clearly decided to prevent the ingress of (large) foreign bodies into the system by putting a grill over the fan opening, so, one auction site purchase (eBay) later, I had some stainless steel grill material to go over my newly engineered hole in the aluminium plate. At this moment in time, I took the opportunity to temporarily re-attach the rubber foot, and used a Stanley knife blade to cut out the circular hole in the rubber foot using the hole I had just drilled/cut out as the template for the Stanley blade. I also took this opportunity to make another couple of modifications to the rubber foot.

Firstly, I figured that I was likely to need to pull the whole thing apart again at some point, and,  therefore, I needed an easier way of getting at the insides of the device, and I don’t fancy pulling the rubber foot off the metal base plate again in any hurry – so getting yet more inspiration (to save the perspiration) from Chris’ breakdown, I used a handy leather punch to “engineer” a series of tiny holes in the rubber foot, precisely where the 10 screws are used to hold the base plate onto the TC chassis. Keeping the little rubber circles that you have cut out, also (again per Chris) says, makes the whole thing look tidy and professional (as much as a hacked hole in the bottom of Apple gear looks) when everything is put back together again.

Again using Chris’s inspiration, I also took the time to engineer a “lip” in the edge of the rubber foot, to allow a better way for the air that has been forced through the PSU, which by now, is rather warmer than what it was on the way into the TC, to exit the chassis. I found that the edge of an external 2 1/2″ HDD chassis was ideal to get a shape for this relatively delicate work.

To be honest, at this point in the “fix”, considering I generally like Apple gear, I am feeling rather disappointed in the “engineering” designs for this product. It doesn’t take a genius to look at this design, and go, “hang on a minute…” (or in the immortal words of Michael Caine, ” ‘ang on lads, I’ve got an idea……” Here I am, with a product, albeit a lot longer past the device warranty status than an awful lot of people got, some had TCs that died within 18 months – if not sooner – mine though, did last best part of 3 years before expiring, and what I am I doing to this product ? Yes – effectively butchering it to turn it into the device that it should have been when it was first purchased – my spin on that is that it’s a total failure at both design, testing, and QA. I bought my MacBook Late 2008, and therefore, I *think* I bought the TC early 2009, and it expired around December 2012, but with everything that life throughs at one – it’s taken me till November 2013 to get around to fixing it ;-(

Nicely snipped the grill to fit around the fan mounting pins, and then glued onto the aluminium base plate – no drama there, used some “standardish” gooey stuff – nothing special as I can’t find my special metal loaded epoxy resin glue 🙁 I think that  it’s in the garage “somewhere” – probably either amongst the spare bits of my nitro-methane powered remote control car, or remote helicopter, or some other crap. Next, again, as with Chris’ beautiful details, I turned the fan upside down, shortened the rubber mounting pins, and re-attached the fan to the base plate. Now, this is where I got intrigued about the fan speed control.

I mean, the TC has this little wire running from the board to the hard drive, and, if you look at the semiconductor attached to the end of the wire, you find, not what I would immediately expect, a thermistor, but a transistor, a 2N3904, with the base and collector connected electrically together, and, if you use a little bit of brute force to heat this transistor up, (I used a lighter I had kicking around on my desk) you can get the fan to turn on – and turn on it does, not just a little gentle blow, but a full on jet engine, and the TC then whinges in the AirPort application that it’s overheating – bloody hell Apple – either one or the other, and neither particularly “good”. For the moment, however, I need to use my TC in anger, so I’ve disconnected the temperature sensor that is attached to the hard drive of the TC, and bolted the whole lot back together again, and just going to live with the “pain” of the jet engine fan (and whinges of AirPort). Other than the front LED flashing orange at me, and the occasional whinge by my AirPort utility to say that the TC is likely to be overheating, (it isn’t – the fan is running at full chat, and blowing lots of air through the PSU ! Trust me, the whine in my ear tells me so!!!!) the TC now works perfectly.