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"Flashing" and/or restarting of RT3 display
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e3steve   
Mon Sep 01 2014, 02:47pm
Joined: Jan 21 2013
Member No: #1163
Location: Warsash, Hants & Palma de Mallorca, Spain
 For the past month or two my RT3's LCD has taken to flashing off & on, sometimes showing the 'Citroën' startup screen with the message "Starting" in the lower r/h corner, usually after a jolt from poor road surfaces (yes, my C6's spheres are in need of attention, along with a suspension software update, but that's another story...).

Slapping the side of the console, adjacent to the head unit, was also replicating the fault.

So, after a few hours of faffing with my lady's 307CC and my 21-year-old J/S63 Espace -- aka 'The Shed' -- I decided to see if I could trace the irritating LCD problem.

The data between the old, steam-driven RT3 (God, it's slow!) head unit and the LCD is communicated via a pair of fibre optic lines, so that was rejected as a possible source of the trouble, and the upper pair of connectors are the ISO-type for power and speaker outputs, so I disconnected the lower pair (one black, one white) from the block. The LCD went off.

The lower black connector seems to be the CD changer interface. I left that one out and pressed the white one home whereby the LCD came alive once more.

Holding the fibre optic lines and the power and speaker ISOs tightly, the LCD fault could be made to occur merely by lightly tapping the RT3's casing against the gearshift knob.

After withdrawing the white connector it's very apparent how to extract the terminal-holder block, simply inserting a thin blade under the latch and sliding the block out sideways.

I carried out my initial test to see if there was a break in any of the conductors: individually grasping each cable, with a pair of needle-nosed pliers, about 30mm from the contact block and testing for any elasticity in the insulation, which would indicate a broken conductor. This is quite a common problem with Molex, Amphenol & other F-type terminations whereby the insulation crimping pierces not only the insulation jacket but also weakens the conductor inside it to the point where vibration breaks it completely. None of the wires felt as though this was the case.

I then extracted a couple of the terminals from the block and tried them for tension on the male pins within the RT3's connector; not good -- they felt as though a light breeze would cause them to pull off the pins! So, having reinserted the extracted terminals into the block I proceeded to re-tension each one by 'denting' one facet of its box-tubular receptacle with a straight pick (spike, really). The connector is only populated with about ten wires so this took a couple of minutes before reassembling the connector and snapping it back into place.

The LCD woke up and..... Bingo! No more intermittency; no more flashing or rebooting. Lovely jubbly!

Hope this tutorial helps others with similar issues.
C6Dave   
Mon Sep 01 2014, 06:14pm

Joined: Oct 01 2009
Member No: #1
Location: Northumberland
 Hopefully this will help others, thanks for sharing it.
Website
e3steve   
Mon Sep 01 2014, 07:34pm
Joined: Jan 21 2013
Member No: #1163
Location: Warsash, Hants & Palma de Mallorca, Spain
 Thanks Dave; no problem.

I should've taken some photos really, but my phone was out of battery!
 

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