Topic: Curiosities found inside the Vue console

[SLOweather]

I have a dead Vue console that I took apart for fun, all the way to peeling the keypad board off the front housing:



The circled area is an unused keypad button located in the middle of the 4 left membrane buttons:



I wonder what that was for?? There is no corresponding conductive ink on the back of the key pad, nor is there a bubble.

And then, on the back of the display board is an area for an uninstalled IC and support components, and some unused configuration jumpers.

[Old Tele man]

Could it ( ? ) be functional on European models?

The U2 IC could be what that button controlled?

[SLOweather]

Well, I plugged a Davis power supply into the console boards, and it works. Dunno why it was broken before.

I can make the buttons work by shorting out the grids. Shorting out the mystery pad makes the beeper beep like the other buttons, but it has no visually noticeable effect on any screen.

The buttons are multiplexed. Now to work on that.

[SLOweather]

For the record... Button multiplexing... By common connections.

Light, Mystery button, Temp,WxCen
Hum, Wind, Rain, Bar
Graph, Hi/Low, Time, Done
+, <, >, - 

Light, Hum, Graph, +
Mystery button, Bar, Done, <
Temp, Wind, Hi/Low, -
WxCen, Rain, Time, >

2nd stands alone

17 buttons minus one loner = 16 = a 4x4 matirx

It could be that the Nystery button was included just to fill out the 4 x 4 matrix. Maybe it has a manufacturing use. It's certainly not placed optimally to put a future button in the middle of the Light/Temp/2nd/WxCen grid.

Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention the unused header location on the display board at the to to the left of the inverted Davis logo in the previous picture.